HOW TO ENJOY A SPANISH EASTER
This Coming week is the best time in
the whole year to see the Spanish mania for religious festivals in action. A
few years ago I was hitch-hiking around Andalucia in early spring when I stumbled
across Easter in Cordoba
almost by accident.
The evening had suddenly turned warm,
as if for my benefit, and I walked down the narrow streets under balconies
overflowing with flowers. The Mezquita, its great courtyard full of
sweet-smelling orange trees, was taking in the late evening sun.
But when I turned round, I noticed
something afoot. Huge crowds sprang up, of children, courting couples and
grandmothers eating ice-creams. Then the slow steady sound of a beating drum
began, sombre, a funereal note. The first conical hats appeared round a corner,
and ghastly, faceless figures, dressed from head to toe in white satin, came
marching.
What the hell was this? The Ku Klux
Klan? In fact it was a band in uniform joining the dirge, and paving the way
for Christ on his cross, mounted on a great sarcophagus of engraved wood,
covered by red carnations.
The whole city of Cordoba
was out, to see the wobbly carriage of their Lord inching past, supported from
beneath by a crew of pallbearers who were being advised on directions by the
Guardia Civil, whispering through chinks in the sarcophagus.
The hooded marchers came on and on,
carrying candles. But the supreme moment was yet to come: the arrival of the
Virgin Mother herself. Heralded by trumpets and horns reedily lifting their
tone, the crowds literally gasped in stupefaction at the sight of her trolley
as it crept into view.
Like a huge four-poster bed, with
canopies held aloft by uprights in the form of silver candelabra, blankets and
bolsters of white carnations, and amid it all, the Virgin herself, the whole
colossal edifice trundled into view.
Suddenly, the crowd looked nervous: how
would their Queen get round this particularly tight corner? The upright
supports swayed and swung with growing violence. The older generation crossed
themselves with fear.
They needn't have worried. The ship
steadied. And then in the Virgin's train come a dozen straight-backed women in
black, wearing high lace mantillas. Expressionless - authentically sorrowful -
they stepped forward, to be followed by more hoods, more candles.
And so it went on through the night;
the marchers and their loads rumbling through the main streets, now standing
still, now moving on, ever accompanied by the beating of drums and the solemn
devotion of the people of Cordoba .
Jeremy Atiyah
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