Easter in Spain
Spanish festivals are rarely serious, which makes Semana Santa, or Holy Week, a bit of a culture shock. It's full-on, moving and funereal...but you still get chocolate with it
EASTER: A holiday weekend that conjures up images of chocolate eggs, daffodils, hot-cross buns - and traffic jams and a few extra lie-ins.
At least, it does in the UK and most of the rest of the AngloSaxon world. But if 2019 is your first experience of Easter in Spain, you'll find very little resemblance between the festival you're used to and the one you see here.
That said, the traffic jams and extra lie-ins are pretty much universal, unless you're in the tourism or catering industry, when you won't get to see either.
Whilst non-churchgoers in the UK, Ireland, USA et al tend to see Easter as a more pagan celebration marking the 'real' start of spring (this actually happened on March 21, but in Britain, you wouldn't have noticed, as there was unlikely to have been much change in the weather), a Spanish Easter is deeply religious, very serious, and very painful (literally).
It's also full of dark and disturbing mysteries, which you may not have known anyone you could ask about, but which, hopefully, you'll find the answers to here.
Getting ready
If you were letting your (pink) hair down and bopping the night away at the Carnival earlier this year, you probably realised you were celebrating your last day of indulgences before six weeks of fasting for Lent (whether you did in fact give up those indulgences the morning after is another matter, although perhaps the sore head made you pledge to do so for the rest of your life). The UK's slightly saner answer to the Carnival is Shrove Tuesday, or 'Pancake Day' - although we bet you didn't know that in the Canary Islands, where the Carnival is the biggest and most flamboyant event of the year, they also eat pancakes on the last night before Lent. These tend to be what we know as Scotch pancakes, the smaller, spongey variety, and usually with honey instead of golden syrup.
Ash Wednesday is marked in the UK and Spain, although unless you've ever been to church, you may not have realised: it involves burning last year's palmleaf crosses or, in Spain, huge palm fans, and drawing a cross on the forehead of the owner during service.
Palm Sunday, five days ago, frequently passes by without a murmur in the UK, although if you went to church, you'd have been given a palm-leaf cross to keep until it's burnt next Ash Wednesday.
In Spain, processions with drums, and dried leaves woven into huge, elaborate fans, take to the streets to recreate the day Jesus entered Jerusalem riding a donkey and the locals spread palm leaves all over the road to protect the animal's hooves.
Open-air theatrical productions - not very well advertised and, unfortunately, easy to miss also took place this week with the Easter parade brotherhoods performing the Passion of Christ, the famous scene of the Last Supper, the breaking of the bread and the communal wine representing the body and blood of Christ, Jesus' betrayal by Judas Iscariot which leads to his being crucified, and the disciple Peter denying him three times as instructed by Christ before his death.
The main Easter events, however, are hard to avoid if you live in a town, and ones which you should go out of your way to witness if you live out of town: the Good Friday parade and the Reencuentro, or 're-encounter'.
Repentance and punishment: Not your typical Friday night
If you've lived here more than a year, you won't have missed being caught up in a typical Spanish fiesta: fireworks, booze, colourful costumes, marching bands, live music, discos until six in the morning and long tables in the streets covered in enough food to stock up Cáritas' shelves for the next six months. Spain is known for its carefree abandon during its globally-famous fiestas, which are often attributed to being the prerogative of a fun-loving Mediterranean community.
To this end, the Good Friday parade and the whole Easter fiesta will come as something of a culture shock.
The music is a solemn drum tattoo, a funeral march, and food, fireworks and fiery liquor are completely out of place. Paraders in 'civvies' - frequently the elderly, and normally in black - bring up the rear of the procession in bare feet, and the sore soles and blisters are all part of the programme. Drummers rub their knuckles raw when they play, and some of the procession members beat themselves with birch-twigs; not always symbolically, either. It's all about punishing oneself for one's sins, repenting and suffering, to remember Jesus' own ordeal and how he died to save us from our evil selves.
If you want to see Good Friday at its most raw - literally head out of the region to the province of Teruel, where the town of Calanda is famous for its Easter drummers who beat their instruments until their fingers bleed and the self-flagellation leads to wide-open gashes or blood-blisters which they then slice open with shards of glass. If you're not squeamish, it's strongly recommended, although even then, be prepared to find yourself wincing a little.
Parades are divided into 'brotherhoods' - actually, 'hermandades', which could also, in theory, translate as 'sisterhoods', and there's no gender exclusion; both sexes take part. But you wouldn't be able to distinguish between them unless you caught sight of their feet beneath their gowns, since they're cloaked head-to-toe in single colours.
Each brotherhood needs its fair share of muscle-bound paraders to act as pall-bearers, or costaleros - they don't have to be men, but generally are, given that the floats they carry on their shoulders weigh over a tonne, or about the equivalent of two large horses.
The floats bear life-sized and lifelike statues marking each stage of the crucifixion, starting with Christ in his crown of thorns, Christ carrying the log on his shoulders that will become the horizontal part of the cross, the crucifixion itself, the bleeding body of Christ, and his grieving mother Mary, all in order so you can follow the story as you watch the parade.
Whether or not you are a believer, the tragedy and injustice of the story, the crude reality of it re-enacted, and the sombre atmosphere into which the brotherhoods plunge themselves make for such an emotional experience that even confirmed atheists cross themselves and choke back the tears. And, incidentally, many members of the brotherhood are atheists themselves, but are equally moved by the performance.
Do they really have to dress up as the Ku Klux Klan?
It's quite startling when you first see a Good Friday parade, and even for adults - never mind kids - pretty scary. Those slow-moving figures, each group in a single colour, gliding along in a huge, shapeless gown like a satin ghost, a flap of the material covering their entire faces with only small holes for the eyes and nose, and a tall, pointy hat look like something you'd find chasing you in one of those dreams where you can't wake up and your legs won't work. They may look familiar, too; the violent and terrifying US-based racist group, the Ku Klux Klan, are depicted wearing exactly the same get-up.
Far-right extremism and a deadly hatred of difference do not seem to tie in very well with the legend of Jesus' dying on the cross to cleanse us of our sins, which begs the question: why would the Spanish Easter brotherhoods model themselves on the KKK?
Actually, they don't. And they're pretty cross about the comparison. It was the Good Friday parade which came first, and the KKK copied them, because they thought they looked frightening and because their faces were hidden. Whilst the brotherhoods hide their faces in shame at their sins, the KKK does so to avoid identification (all bullies are cowards, of course).
For the brotherhoods, the tall hats are supposed to be pointing up towards heaven, and the higher the peak, the closer they are to God - although it's unclear whether they have any significance at all for the KKK.
The correct term for the Easter 'hoodies' is capirote - and, to complete their chagrin, the BBC was forced to apologise a few years ago when it used a photo of a capirote from Sevilla, the capital of the Good Friday parades, to illustrate a story about the KKK. Whoops.