Outandabout March 2022 Issue195

FEBRUARY 2022 | 31
mock mourning. The ceremony is normally held
on (or in our modern hard-working times, on the
handiest weekend to) Ash Wednesday.
It’s a symbolic burial of the past. The ceremony
is stripping away the past, in a socially established
ritual of chaos, burning out the mayhem of carnival
and the long winter months, and ushering in from
the ashes a new year, a society reborn and serious
once again, ready to face the hardships of the future.
With King Charles III shortly after he ascended to
the throne of Spain in 1759 he was a solemn believer
in tradition and encouraged local fiestas before Lent
on the condition that villagers buckled down to
their religious duties afterwards.
The story runs that on one Ash Wednesday the
King ordered the last day of the fiesta in Madrid to
be marked with an enormous festival at which free
fish – sardines – would be given out to all, and all
meat was to be buried, symbolising that no meat
could be eaten for the next 40 days.
However, it being a hot day, and Madrid being a
long way from the sea, when the cooks opened the
crates of fresh sardines the stench made everyone
ill.
King Charles furiously ordered the fish instead of
the meat to be buried in the Casa del Campo park
where the fiesta was being held. The attendees leapt
to work with gusto, and the fiesta carried on all day
– but with the revellers consuming meat instead of
the fish, by Royal Dispensation.
In fact, it was such a success that it became an
annual tradition that quickly spread elsewhere in
Spain.
What we do know is that many Spanish festivals
end with the symbolic destruction of a figure that
represents all the vice and fun that accumulated
over the course of the fiesta
The burial ceremony came to replace older
Spanish customs held to mark the end of the
winter. Many ancient Mediterranean cultures held
symbolic ceremonies to welcome the arrival of
Spring, and especially good luck rituals to ensure
the fishermen, who could now venture back out
to sea without fear of the winter storms, had good
hauls.
February 24 was called the day of the Halcyons
by Ptolemy in his Phaseis. This was held to be the
day that the Halcyons, a mythical bird with the
power to calm the waves of the sea, would head out
to the Mediterranean to build their floating nests,
and thus end the winter storms. Incidentally, that’s
where we get the expression “those halcyon days”
from, those period of quiet gentle days of our youth.
It thus marked the beginning of the Spring
fishing season.
The tradition was picked up and spread by the
Arabs, who called the days between February 21
and 24 the Al riyab Al-jutt’afiyya – the winds of
calm – a tradition that the medieval Spanish would
adopt, calling it the winds of the Quelidonios.
These early Spring traditions would eventually
become absorbed by Christianity. In the same way
that the Anglican Church still celebrates Harvest
Thanksgiving, a ceremony to be grateful for the
harvest bounty of Autumn, these Spring traditions
would try to ensure a good bounty and good luck
for the season ahead.
The Inquisition, never a very understanding
bunch of men, did their best to eliminate such
festivals, but failed. And the Spanish Enlightenment
of the late 18th century would allow these ancient
traditions to be resurrected under a new name and
a new veneer of respectability.
People tend to confuse the burial with Ash
Wednesday. That marks the start of Lent, the forty
days of abstinence before Easter. The “Ash” of
Wednesday comes from the tradition of burning the
carefully kept palm leaves of the previous year’s
Palm Sunday, which marks the start of Easter.
But Carnival is always held in the fortnight
before Lent starts. It’s a way of letting your hair
down after the hard winter and before the serious
business of Lent begins.
The ceremony calls together the town and says:
“Look, we’ve all had our fun, now let’s settle down
and get back to work”.
Unless you’re Murcian, of course. They bury
the sardine at the beginning of the carnival, and
there it represents the contrary: Order and Work is
buried away out of sight so it isn’t shocked by the
Carnival. Which mind set is why their Carnivals are
considered to be the best in Spain.