Semana Santa

Antigua is a beautiful little town of colourful one-story colonial style storefronts and cobblestone streets surrounded by mountains. Beautiful houses with immaculately kept gardens of exotic flowers hide behind brightly colored walls, revealing themselves only briefly with the entrance or exit of someone though a tall iron gage. In the distance, Vulcan Agua towers over the town, casting a shadow over the ruins of old churches that adorn almost every other corner of town. The central park, flanked on three sides by storefronts, the last by an enormous Catholic Church, is always filled with people, chatting on the numerous shaded benches, having their shoes shined by one of the local shoeshine boys, or simply passing through on their way to somewhere else. On most days the streets of Antigua are abuzz with life, but not claustrophobically so. The week before Semana Santa things began to change.

Traffic was blocked from all streets save the ones on the periphery, replaced by hoards of visiting Guatemalans and a handful of foreign tourists; street vendors begin popping up on every corner and many stores, regardless of their regular inventory, erected a grill and a few tables out front, inviting people to rest and enjoy some tacos fresh from the grill. The streets, block after block of inlayed cobblestone, went from their typical grey, to a rainbow of colors as the traditional carpets of Semana Santa were constructed along the parade routes.

These alfombras (carpets) are a strong tradition in Guatemala as well as many other countries of Central and South America. The carpets, created out of sand, colored sawdust, fruit, flowers and various other objects, are constructed in the streets along the parade routes as offerings to Christ. As the processions pass, those in the front gingerly walk around the carpet, until finally, the image of Christ bearing the cross, carried on the shoulders of 40+ devotees, passes over the carpet, during which it is symbolically accepted by Christ and realistically scattered all over the road by numerous marching feet. What is not destroyed by the parade is soon pilfered by waiting children, while the rest is the scooped up by a team of men with shovels who empty their shovels into a bulldozer, which then dumps the whole load in the back of a waiting dump truck. Some of these carpets take 12 or more hours to complete and less than a twelfth of an hour to obliterate.

Semana Santa begins in earnest on Holy Thursday with the first procession of the week (earlier processions had taken place each Sunday during Lent). The processions consist of a countless number of people – women and young girls dressed in their Sunday best, men and boys in adorned in purple robes – either proceeding, or carrying huge ¨floats¨ (for lack of a better word) with scenes depicting a dark skinned representation of Christ carrying a Cross. Each 10 minutes or so, the procession halts to allow a new group of faithful to take on the burden and relieve the previous bearers of their load. Each procession includs a brass band playing somber, foreboding tunes and a team of incense bearers with enough incense to announce the arrival of a procession blocks away. The ¨float¨ with the image of Christ is always followed by a smaller flight bearing an image of the Virgin Mary, completely born by women. The processions all originat in a certain Church, wind their way through streets flanked by dense crowds of onlookers, for three or four hours, before returning to the church of origin. From our place on the side of the road, the movement of the floats was much like that of a boat, as each side lurched along in synch with the heavy strides of the bearers.

While the processions were impressive, the carpets were of indescribable beauty and detail. Many contained crosses, doves or other symbols of faith, created out of intricate arrangements of flowers, while other, more ornate, carpets depicted scenes from the Bible in exacting detail. Those made from sand or brightly colored sawdust, were formed with stencils, while those of flowers and fruit were original designs of their creators imaginations. My favorite depicted four images of indigenous Guatemalan women from the back, a basket full of wares balanced on their heads, their hair cascading down their backs, braids of black silk cutting through the brilliant rainbow of their traditional blouses. There were so well done, they appeared to have been painted there by the artist herself.

Early Friday morning, we arrived in the park in time to see a re-enactment of the crucification of Christ, a frighteningly real event that entailed men dressed as Roman soldiers reading out a list of crimes, after which a life-like figure of Christ was hung on a life sized cross. Later that day, after the figure of Chris as taken down from the cross, the sea of purple robes, changed to a sea of black, as the faithful mourned their saviour. I could not see how anyone, regardless of religious belief, could not be moved by this tremendous show of faith.

Come Monday, after the Easter processions, Antigua returned to normal: the crowds dispersed, the traffic returned, and the streets, so colourfully adorned just hours before, returned again to their normal state, a few traces of colored sand, all that remained of the festivities of the week before.