My relationship with Semana Santa, or Holy Week, began two months before the event itself, in the kitchen of Señora Martínez, the grandmother of the little girl I’d started babysitting. Whilst two-year-old Lola’s vocabulary was limited – the same three words would always come up: leche (milk), mocos (snot) and caca (poo) – I often stuck around after I’d finished babysitting to talk to her abuela, who gave naïve and unsuspecting me such great insight into the tradition. “Elsa, guapa,” she said with a grave look in her eyes, “just you wait until Holy Week. Trust me, you’ve never seen anything like it.”
Fast forward a month, to five and a half weeks before Easter Sunday. Heading home from the office one day, I saw what seemed to be a giant beast progressing down the road, people halted around it in amazement. Advancing as quickly as its stature would allow, I easily caught up with it, and soon noticed that the moving creature was in fact a wooden structure with sheets messily draped over it. The fabric shifted from left to right with the motion, revealing at least three dozen men huddling shoulder to shoulder underneath, each body moving in synchronisation to support the wood. When enquiring with abuela a few days later, I learned this was a practice procession before the real ones, of which there would be many in the weeks to come.
The first proper procession I saw was by accident, and took place on the Monday before Holy Week (the name of the event is somewhat misleading; Spaniards seem to cram in as many processions as they can, including before and after the official dates of the celebration). My housemates and I were watching TV at home when we suddenly heard a blast of drums coming from outside. Slightly irked at having to pause at the denouement of our action film, we went onto the balcony and watched in disbelief as a huge melancholic Virgin Mary swayed past us at eye level, enabling us to see a single painted teardrop making its way down her cheek in true iconographical style. Embellished with a magnificent crown of gold, and surrounded by shining silver candleholders, the Madonna commanded your attention, but she also made it difficult not to question the provenance of such visible wealth.
Huge crowds squeezed into our narrow street to make the sign of the cross at the paso (float) as it went by, held up by those short, stocky (and red-faced) men – known as costaleros – I’d seen a few weeks before, all of whom were hidden underneath by the velvet cape, moving left, right, left, right in time with the percussion. Soaring above the steady rhythm of the military drums was the regal high-pitched tone of trumpets and cornets, supported by a collection of other brass instruments played by at least a 50-piece marching band. Preceding the paso were dozens of nazarenos, or penitents, ominous-looking figures who remained anonymous thanks to their capirotes, cone-shaped pointed hats covered with fabric that extended from their chests to a metre above their heads – the height indicating their proximity to God – with only eyeholes to reveal the individual underneath.
First employed in the 15th century as a sign of public humiliation to notify onlookers of their sins – different coloured fabrics denoted different types of crimes – the capirotes later gave rise to the nickname my friends and I affectionately bestowed upon the penitents: ‘pointies’. (Pointies became the source of much entertainment as we began to share the funniest/weirdest places we’d seen them. The bakery aisle of Mas, one of Spain’s biggest supermarkets, was perhaps the best, but hey, sinners have got to eat too, right?)
The nazarenos held one of three items: a large wooden cross, a thurible of incense or a metre-long candle which, whether lighted or just sitting in the sunlight, would melt onto their robes and the ground beneath them, so that at the end of the celebrations, the streets were sticky with hardened wax. Those close enough to the candles might also find themselves dowsed in the stuff, as was the case of a friend of mine, after which we spent the evening picking the red gloop out of his hair like apes picking off each other’s lice.
Then came the official Holy Week. Surprisingly hot after weeks of rain, Semana Santa only became more magnificent. Like something out of a Miró painting, vivid red and purple fabrics worn by the Virgin stood out against the cloudless blue sky, whilst Jesus’ skeletal figure was illuminated by the reflections of sunlight on the gold beneath him.
Although the heat made the processions visually more spectacular, it also made for a difficult time for the nazarenos. Every member of the parade would walk from their church to the main streets of the city and then back again. Some churches were situated close to the centre, thus meaning a short journey time, but others lay on Seville’s outskirts, with the longest procession requiring that each participant walk for 12 hours by the time they’d finished (with a few changes in between). Temperatures were consistently reaching the mid-thirties, so being covered head to ankle (many walked barefoot, and some with chains around their feet), as well as being forbidden from eating or drinking during the procession in an act of self-flagellation, led to reports of nazarenos fainting whilst on duty.
But it wasn’t only the pointies who had their work cut out for them under the southern Spanish sun. The costaleros, clad in protective headpieces, are tasked with bearing the weight of the paso, often more than 2000kg, on their neck and shoulders. To give themselves a break, every hour or two the 40 or so costaleros switch with another troupe of men (women carrying the float is a taboo subject), and this process is arguably more memorable than the statues themselves. After having slowly lowered the float to the ground, the men quickly scramble out from under the wooden structure like insects scuttling away from the underside of a rock and, as if you’d just opened an oven, you’re met with a wave of heat as the already cramped street is joined by several sweaty men.
Those of us in the city who were new to Semana Santa, and for whom the religious aspects were less important, soon found that the processions became more of an annoyance than a treat, especially because we didn’t know how to avoid them like the locals did. I know what you must be thinking: but what an incredible opportunity to witness so many processions so up-close, right? Right… provided you didn’t have somewhere you needed to be. With nazarenos, musicians, costaleros, other members of the church, as well as thousands of people packed into one narrow street either side of the paso, and with the strict rule of not being able to cross a procession whilst it was in action (we found out about this the hard way), it would sometimes be hours before you saw the back of your last pair of pointies. And even then, once you made it past one parade, there was always another lurking around the corner. Holy Week became a test of how well we knew the city; if we make a left here and cut out Calle Azafrán, can we bypass the procession before it gets to Calle Sierpes?
In the same way you feel peeved when your train to work is delayed, or when your junction of the motorway is closed, at the mere sound of a drum, whiff of incense or slight crowd of onlookers, for the rest of my time in Seville I was instilled with the uneasiness that it was about to take me another few hours to get to my destination. The frequency of processions also meant we became accustomed to them. There were many days where I’d find myself sitting at my desk and not batting an eyelid as I heard the steady approach of musicians, Jesus’ head peering into my room for a brief moment before continuing onwards. And besides, once you’ve seen one weepy Mary, you’ve kind of seen them all.
As I write this in my kitchen in the southern English countryside, some four months after Semana Santa, I’m wearing a gift my parents gave me for my birthday, which I was also fortunate enough to celebrate in Seville. Looking down at my feet, I see dozens of differently coloured penitents adorning my socks, a reminder of the happy time I spent in Seville, but mainly of that truly bizarre, dreamlike week in April.
