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The month of April
comes up and together with it, the Holy
Week of Spain. This week is especially
celebrated in a city of the South. This
city is called Seville. In Seville,
there is a tradition which nearly has 7
centuries if existence. At the beginning
of the 1st century AD, Iulius Caesar put
the name of “Colonia Iulia Romula
Hispalensis” to Seville. This meant
something something like ¨the little
Rome” due to the similarities of the
Roman Seville with Rome, the capital of
the Empire. Nowadays the passion of the
Christ is celebrated in a very special
way, in which the whole city really gets
out of its way with such an amazing
mixture of smells, feelings, sensations
and artistic manifestations which make
this spectacle to be considered
¨Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Among the different
processions we can find sculptures from
the 16th and 17th centuries. Seville was,
then and due to the colonization of
America, the richest city on Earth.
Woodcarvers as Juan de Mesa and Martínez
Montañés are some of the most famous
names. But the Holy Week is not only
sculptures or carvings. It is also music
bands which rehearse during the whole
year, and people who practise every day
to be able to carry the floads in which
the religious figures are displayed and
move these floads with the rhythm of the
music through the narrow streets of the
city.
In the previous weeks
we can enjoy the incomparable smell of
jasmine which drops from the orange
trees and which even the poet Lord Byron
mentioned in his poem “Don Juan”. When
spring comes, this is the most
characteristic smell in this city.
The week begins on
“Palm Sunday” (Domingo de Ramos) and
ends with the Resurrection of the Christ
one week after. The city takes out a
large number of pieces of art, together
with a large number of people who take
care of the good functioning of the
processions and who work during the
whole year for just one day: The Big Day,
the day of the procession.
The Holy Week is made
up of 56 different brotherhoods and more
than 100 different floads. Each one of
these brotherhoods has a procession and
one, two or three different floads
depending on the brotherhood. And each
one of these processions has a leading
cross (“cruz de guía”), hundreds of
nazarenes (anonymous people who
accompany the floads as a penitence),
the music bands, which open the
procession and go right after every
fload. However, some of the processions
are not accompanied by any band. This is
interpreted as a sign of mourning for
the death of Christ constituting a
perfect example of the chronology of the
Holy Week in Seville where every fload
and brotherhood conforms one piece in a
perfect art puzzle. The “costaleros” are
probably the most important members of
the floads. They carry the floads over
their shoulders trying to move
themselves under the rhythm of the
music.
The figures are
mounted upon a “parihuela” which is a
sort of altar, from 1 ½ meter to 3
meters high, and, from 5 to 7 meters
long depending upon the scene being
represented. There are 3 main types of
floads: “misterios”, where we can see a
representation of one scene in the
passion of the Christ, going from the
arrival to Jerusalem until he is
pronounced dead and descended from the
cross, going through, for example, the
presentation of Jesus to the people of
Judea by Ponctius Pilates. The second
type is the “crucifiction” where we have
the figure of Christ standing on the
cross in different passages: asking for
water, in the moment of the expiration,
etc... And the third type represents the
figure of the Virgin Mary in solitude
after the death of her son.
Seville is known as
the “city of Mary” since it was the
church of Seville the one which proposed
the purity of the conception to the
church of Rome. It was aproved by the
Pope in 1854. Because of that, the
entire city do their utmost before these
images and respect them as the real
Queens of the city. Perfect examples are
the popular images of “la Esperanza de
Triana” and “la Macarena”, ¨who¨ divide
the city for the love towards its
mother.
Holy Week in Seville
is a feeling. For each person it
represents something completely
different. It is a cascade of emotions
in which everyone in the city has
different memories going from he/she was
a child and used to go to see the
processions accompanied with his/her
parents or grandparents to when he/she
is the one who shows the floads and
parades to his/her own friends, sons,
grandsons...
This cascade of
emotions gets even bigger when the night
comes and all of this people, who wait
expectantly in the old streets of the
city´s historic downtown (the biggest
Historic Downtown in Europe), join the
floads in a perfect symbiosis before the
unique light of the candles of the
nazarenes and floads, and the greatness
of a shining Giralda which arises as a
guard and supreme judge of a city. All
of this makes an espectacle of the Holy
Week which, no matter credes or
religions, nobody should miss.
Bibliography:
Antonio M. Rueda. Profesor de
Lengua Española en la Universidad de
Chicago (EE.UU.)
Publicado en
el periódico "El Informador", diario en
español para los hablantes de la
misma lengua en Chicago e Illinois. El
Autor es hermano de la Hermandad de San
Benito.
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