MALLORCA’S SANT JORDI - ROSES, BOOKS AND CONQUEST
How did some traditions in Mallorca come about and were they in fact Mallorcan? Certainly not all of them. Take the twelve grapes of New Year’s Eve, for example. While the grapes are said to go back to a time in nineteenth century Madrid when the ordinary folk would gather in Puerta del Sol and take the rise out of the wealthy quaffing fines at their grand New Year parties by eating grapes instead, the real boost came from grape merchants in the Alicante region of 1909 who needed to encourage sales because of overproduction.
All the stuff about bringing prosperity in the New Year was a marketing ploy, and so was the scheme that made Sant Jordi (Saint George) the big deal it now is; big deal if you are a bookseller, that is. The happy if perhaps unfortunate coincidence of Shakespeare having died on St. George’s Day in 1616 and Miguel de Cervantes having been buried on the same day (he died on April 22) was the pretext for Spanish publishers having invented the book day in the 1920s. An added sales pitch was directed at young women, who could now give their beloveds something by way of exchange for the red roses presented on April 23.
Florists of today do pretty brisk business because of Sant Jordi, but the rose-giving doesn’t have its roots in commercial enterprise. It’s all the stuff of legend, Catalan legend, as in the Catalan version of George and the Dragon.
Once upon a time in the village of Montblanc in the province of Tarragona, a dragon had been terrorising the area for many a year. It had devoured that many animals that the villagers’ existence was threatened. The village itself and its inhabitants had become potential targets. In order to stop the dragon directly attacking Montblanc, the village elders decided to sacrifice one of the people. A draw was to be made, and the unlucky winner was to be sent out of the village and to a fateful encounter with the dragon.
No one was excluded from this draw. It included the royal family. As things were to turn out, the beautiful daughter of the king was selected. However, fortune was to intervene. When she was on the
point of being gobbled up by the dragon, a knight appeared on the scene - Sant Jordi. He thrust his lance into the dragon and, as it died, it spewed out blood. At the spot where the dragon’s blood was spilled, a rosebush grew with red roses. The tradition for Saint George’s Day was thus established.
Sant Jordi’s position in Mallorcan folklore runs deeper than his dragon-slaying exploits. This goes all the way back to the conquest of 1229. When King Jaume was entering Madina Mayurqa (Palma), who was there beside him? Yes, it was Sant Jordi. Or so the king reckoned. So also did Muslims and Christians alike.
The first soldier to actually enter was supposedly a knight on a white horse. Depicted in a famous painting of 1468 by Pere Niçard, the knight wore the cross of Saint George. His role in the conquest is legend, but the truth is that the somewhat mysterious Knights of Sant Jordi de Alfama did indeed participate in the conquest.
These knights were to be awarded some spoils of conquest, such as two farmsteads in what
was then called Yartan (by the Muslims); Arta, as it became. The mystery surrounding them is because not much is known about them. What is known is that they were a military order founded by Jaume’s father, Pere el Catòlic of Aragon in 1201. They had express purposes - to protect pilgrims, fight the saracens and control and defend a large and mostly uninhabited area called the Alfama desert. And that was in what is today the Tarragona province, the source of the legend of Sant Jordi.
Jordi was also around when Jaume conquered Valencia. He appeared “with many knights from paradise, who helped win the battle, in which no Christian was killed”. So said the chronicle of the time. He had in fact been popping up for some considerable while before this, such as in 1096 when another Pere of Aragon won the Battle of Alcoraz near Huesca in Aragon. The Muslims were defeated when Jordi put in an appearance on the battlefield. The red cross on a white background became a feature of the shield of Aragon; it still is a feature. Jordi’s association with Mallorca was therefore official in that the Kingdom of Mallorca formed part of the Crown of Aragon.
As saints in Mallorca go nowadays, Jordi doesn’t offer the excuse for riotous fiestas, but he is certainly an important saint. He’s not a patron like he is in so many places but he does carry considerable saintly clout and he does have places named after him Sant Jordi in Palma and Colonia Sant Jordi. Or does he? In the case of the Colònia Agrícola de Sant Jordi, the farming colony established in 1870, the founder was the Marquess Palmer, aka Jordi Descallar. Did he assume sainthood and name the place after himself?Vestibulum