Una noche de Semana Santa (A Night of Semana Santa)

After waking up at 4:12am yesterday in Dublin to get back to Sevilla, I went out in the evening/night with Cristina, my Spanish friends, and her friends to see the last night of Semana Santa. I won't go into too much description, but Semana Santa (Holy Week), is one of two major festivals in Sevilla. It's the reason I had this past week off. Basically, each day of the week preceding Easter, there are 'pasos' (or processions) through Sevilla. Each hermandad, or church group, creates different float thingies to represent different stories from the bible. The hermandades parade through Sevilla. Each day there are different ones going in different directions. It's really interesting. Each paso consists of not just the big float thingie, but also members of the hermandad dressed in traditional Semana Santa clothing (to us it looks like the Ku Klux Klan), candles, and often times a band.

It was really nice to experience Semana Santa with locals. I was with Cristina and her childhood friend who belongs to the same hermandad (they both opted to not be in it this year), some of her friends' cousins, and then other people kind of randomly came and left. Most of them were affiliated with the same hermandad, so it was fun watching that paso go by. We saw it twice -- the first time was less of a big deal than the second time, so there were less people (normally the streets are PACKED), and it was fun watching them try to figure out which fully-covered kid was their cousin, friend, sibling, etc. Basically, because it had meaning for them and they knew what they were doing, it made the experience for me much more interesting.

Now, I should pause here and reinforce that, although the material of this is 100% religious, it really is not a religious thing. People were out in the plazas, drinking beers (I had a tinto de verano, my favorite), watching, talking, and laughing as the Ku Klux Klan wannabe members dragged crosses through the streets. Cristina and her friends told me that although they are in the hermandades and have participated in the past, they aren't religious and describe themselves more as agnostic. The tradition of Semana Santa is based more in tradition, in community, in a festival in the streets. And that definitely showed. It was not a crazy Catholic event. Not at all. It was a community in the streets. It was conversation and art. Sure, based in religion, but not the partakers were not necessarily religious.

The big float-ish looking things are carried by people underneath. It is crazy. There are typically between 30-40 people who balance the paso on their head while walking very slowly and evenly to the beat of the music (some of the more formal processions don't have any music; it just depends). It looks painful to me, but it's all about tradition (traditionnnnnnnnn! tradition! Fiddler, anyone?).

A paso going through the city center at dusk. I didn't have my good camera, so the pictures aren't as nice, but you still get the idea.

Another one, a few minutes later farther down the street. The procession paths go everywhere, but we stayed pretty centrally located and saw a lot.

A close-up of the basic costume of only some of the people in the procession. These were kids, talking to each other. People in the procession often would stop to hug a friend, pick up a child and play with them, or just have a sip of beer. This was not entirely a formal occasion, even though our United Statesian (translation from Spanish, I'm going to start using it) mindset would assume otherwise.

And, lastly, I have a badly-filmed video of Cristina's hermandad returning after a night of paso-ing. There was an enormous crowd in the plaza outside the entrance of her church. All the lights were turned off and it was totally silent except for a man singing, as you'll see. You can also see the cone hats of the people walking in front of the paso.

There was a kind of mesmerizing beauty to it.. but that said, it was also almost 1am, and I was quite tired. After that paso was done, Cristina and her friends were going on to the last one of the night, but I just couldn't do it, so I left them and caught a cab home. I was just too tired, and my Spanish abilities were shutting down. It was great being with her friends and they were all very nice, but I felt a bit like an outsider the whole time. It's also interesting because I've found that sevillanos generally don't know how to act around foreigners, even though there are so many of us in Sevilla. There's definitely not too much mixing between the two groups. They were all kind of curious about me, I could tell, but didn't ask me anything and weren't very forward because they weren't sure what to expect. I think it goes along with not having any racial or ethnic or cultural variety in Sevilla, so then drop a tall Jewish girl from some state no one has heard of into the mix and it can freak people out a bit. But, all that said, once I made the first steps they were warm and, like I said, I had a very memorable experience.

So, the festival went all week, but I feel like I saw everything that I needed to see last night, walking around (and drinking and eating) with Cristina and her friends. I owe Cristina a big thank you for a night of experiencing Semana Santa the Spanish way (ha, even though I was very unspanish and bailed early)! Last night my anthro-trained head was going crazy... in an enjoyable, overtired kind of way. Going away for a week also gave me a renewed appreciation for Sevilla and for how beautiful it is, which made me happy.