The Holy Week
Waiting around Sevilla for god to show up.
There are thousands of people squeezed into the Plaza del Salvador in the center of Sevilla, and the balconies and rooftops lining the square are likewise packed. It’s nearly dusk, and the city is muggy and caked with bright-yellow dirt, the leftovers from a sandstorm blown northward from the Sahara that mixed with the unseasonable rain earlier in the afternoon. The sky has lost some of the ungodly, menacing hue it once held, but we bear the marks of the foul weather: everyone has dusty splotches on the shoulders of their fine suits, of their pretty dresses.
I’ve lost track of my friends in the sheer mass of well-dressed and attractive people. The men all kind of look the same here, the Andalusian Standard Male Sunday Best outfit consisting of a dark suit, a light blue shirt, and a colourful tie. Many have a cardigan (brown or blue) tied around their waist. Many have a puffy vest under the jacket due to the rainy weather, which is seen as a symbol of winter in Sevilla. The women have a certain sameness too, wearing heels with elegant pantsuits or long dresses, all in similar bright tones.
Being separated from my friends is not distressing, since none of us can move anyway. They were somewhere close by, even if I can’t pick them out of the crowd. Everyone, the whole crowded mass, is swaying happily and chatting and snacking and waiting, so I sway and wait too, and wish I had a snack. Across the plaza, the procession Borraquito is arriving back to the Iglesia Colegial del Divino Salvador.
Two rows of nazarenos (penitents) in long white tunics and tall pointy hats carry candles slowly toward the church gate. Music can be heard somewhere off in the distance through Sevilla’s narrow streets, a signifier that one of the procession’s pasos is nearing. Each procession has one or two of these pasos, enormous and heavy displays like parade floats, always depicting either Christ in some stage of his final days or the Virgin Mary in her various states of distress—or of her ultimate, serene acceptance. These pasos are hoisted and carried step-by-step around a procession route by about 50 men called porteros (and they are always men). The procession routes are all different. Every procession begins and ends at its patron church and is required to pass along a few hundred meteres of a central path to Sevilla’s remarkable, but the rest of the route depends on where the patron church is. In each procession, the pasos are immediately preceded by people carrying incense and standards and immediately followed by marching bands of varying size and ability. A single procession can last for more than 12 hours, depending on the length of the route and the number of nazarenos. The longest ones—with over 2,000 nazarenos—take as long as two hours to pass by a single spot.
The smoke from the incense bearers has begun to waft from the opposite corner of the Plaza del Salvador. A low drumbeat bounces off some faraway wall. This signals to the entire crowd that the paso is about to enter, and thousands of people begin shushing one another. (North American readers will imaging a kind of “shhhhhhhh” sound, but the Sevilla shush is like a tsking, a sound from behind clenched teeth, like you’re telling a cat to stop clawing you.) The shushing quickly gives way to a startling silence, the whole square having been shushed into quiet submission. Any attempt to talk is met with several dozen sharp tsks, and within a few seconds, it is utterly still.
The paso shuffles into view across the square, this one probably a “Cristo” (an image of Christ, but it’s hard for the uninitiated to tell from across a vast plaza) but moving with the familiar gorgeous rhythm of all pasos, that sheer human will to move a big thing somewhere other than where it currently is. Behind the paso, the band begins to play, nothing somber or sad but a full spectacular march with swelling horns and drums and in contrast to the silence of the square moments earlier, the sound is devastating and beautiful.
Then the music suddenly dies and another silence takes hold. The men under the paso navigate a tricky corner and carry the float for a dozen meters toward a ramp leading up to the church. This is the home stretch, and the paso wobbles onward and ever-so-slightly upward, every breath in the plaza held. A few wobbles more and it’s gone, completely inside the church. The square erupts with applause and the band starts up a triumphant, horn-filled tune. When the band stops playing again, the square is already starting to clear, the sky having once again grown menacing. The band takes a smoke break. Tired porteros collapse in the church, the job done for another year. The bars around Sevilla fill with exhausted watchers, everyone smiling and laughing and looking nervously at the clouds. So goes Semana Santa, the holy week.
The entirety of holy week reminds me of one of my favourite songs, which begins like this: “There are times that walk from you, like some passing afternoon.” It’s an old Iron and Wine song, and it’s mostly about the slow life in Georgia and the way that traditions are handed down across the generations, and about the obligation to religion in traditional places (“And she’s chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings” and “Sunday pulls the children from their piles of fallen leaves”). There’s an inescapability to the lyrics that always felt equal parts melancholic and sweet to me, that ever-presence of religion, the oppression of traditions.
These are things I’ve never experienced firsthand, a child of an agnostic and an atheist or something similar. We never talked about religion at home, but were sent to bible camp religiously each summer because my town had a by-donation/pay-what-you-can summer camp run by Baptists. My parents decided to pay zero dollars, and we lived in a cachement area that allowed us to go twice per summer, equaling four weeks of free childcare. Camp was mostly sports and singing children’s hymns and catchy Christian songs. There was a really great tuck shop, and we’d each get a dollar every day to take with our lunches so we could buy candy. There was an hour of chapel in the mornings (mostly singing) and random prizes taped the bottoms of the plastic chairs that filled this small rural church. One time per camp we’d go on a day-long canoe trip to this place on the lake called Slippery Rock, and we’d spend the afternoon sliding down a slimy angular rock into the dark waters of Graphite Lake and laugh and scream and it was pure Ontario summer glory. “Is this what god does?” I’d wondered. Splashing around with your friends in cold lake on a hot summer day, the sky dotted with big puffy clouds—surely this is the definition of divinity. Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention in the bible classes.
Sometimes, the camp counsellors—mostly troubled youths from around town who I’m sure were doing some sort of court-mandated community service in this role as youth leaders—would ask us halfheartedly if we wanted to accept the Jesus Christ as our personal lord and savior. When I said no, they always looked slightly relieved.
Beyond those weeks at bible camp, religion was always a kind of low-level background noise to my life in rural Ontario. Our elementary school had more than its fair share of evangelical teachers—my fifth grade teacher was also a reverend in a small Baptist parish church—but only the most fervent of these risked crossing the line between Church and State. My fourth grade teacher was a preacher’s wife and would read from the New Testament around Christmas (and all year long our spelling tests would contain the names of biblical places, which is how I am still able to spell Bethlehem and Nazareth and Gomorrah with ease). My most significant Christian trauma also happened in fourth grade.
My best friend one day asked me if I believed in god, maybe out of the blue or maybe because we had been quizzing each other on the spelling of Galilee. We mostly talked about hockey or soccer or the Ninja Turtles, so this was a departure. I had no idea what to say in response, so he kindly asked me if I wanted to try praying with him. I said sure, of course, I’d love to, because I knew as a young boy that you shouldn’t deliberately hurt someone’s feelings, and also another part of me really wanted to try it, in earnest. It was winter, and during one school recess (the short one in the morning), he and I went to a remote part of the schoolyard and got on our knees and clasped our mittened hands together in front, just like you’d see on TV. He said some words, which I repeated with whatever solemnity I could imitate. I closed my eyes so tightly in case he was looking at me, and there in the cold field I hoped desperately to feel something. When we were finished, he said, “Did you feel something?” and I told him the truth: I didn’t think so. We went back inside to do our 30 minutes of French homework.
I went home that night entirely devastated. It’s one of the earliest feelings of disappointment that I can remember in my life: a search for a bigger thing, a call unanswered. I struggled to find the words then to describe to my parents why I was upset, and today have no clearer understanding about it. Was I sad that I couldn’t feel anything? Or was I just a kid who wanted to share something with another kid and felt left out?
Thirty years on, I know. I felt left out. Standing in the dust-caked square in Sevilla, I still felt no connection to god or Jesus or whoever, and knew that everyone around me did. But that didn’t matter; I was still profoundly moved by the spectacle, by the shared experience with those who probably did believe in god or Jesus, in saints and miracles, in the whole godly thing.
After the Borraquito’s paso had entered the church, the rain began to fall in earnest. People hurried from the square, desperate to squeeze into a bar to wait for news of either another procession or the cancellation of the rest of the day’s events. Each day during Semana Santa involves at least 12 hours of processions, and only a handful of these begin before noon. The last arrives back to its home church well past midnight. Devout Sevillianos, or at least passionate ones like my host Antonio, live in a kind of on-off frenzy throughout each day. They intersect a procession at a particular location to see the pasos, then squeeze through the crowds to find a place for a drink and a snack, then rush to the next spot on the map to see the next procession.
On the Plaza del Salvador, one bar has room for our group, which starts with four people and ends with about 20. This bar has no chairs. No bar has chairs. During Semana Santa, they’re all tucked into storage to make room for more exhausted people, none of whom get to sit down. I guess this encourages people to move around between locations, spending money quickly and leaving to find somewhere to rest. It works. The bars are constantly packed, people scarfing down tiny sandwiches and chugging Sevilla’s hilarious tiny beers.
(A quick note that serves as actual, real-world travel information! In Sevilla, when you order a beer, it is assumed that you want a caña, which is about 200ml of beer usually served in pint glass, of which fills up about one third of the cup. Supposedly, this is so that the beer will be cold for the entire time you’re drinking, which is about 11 seconds. A pint would get too warm, the logic goes. Let me try, I say. A larger beer exists in the form of a cortado, which is supposedly a double but which is really about 300ml. Still, the glass looks more full and feels more satisfying to hold, and my beer has never once gotten hot while drinking it. It’s considered in bad taste to order these larger beers, and unspeakable if you’re a local, hence most people drink 2-3 teensy tiny beers in quick succession and move on to another bar.)
The group I was with showed no interest in braving the rain to find another location, and news was spreading that the rest of the day’s processions had been cancelled, so we stayed put and discovered a loophole in the Semana Santa system: if you keep ordering food and drinks, you can remain at the same bar for hours. If you’re lucky, they may even let you lean on the wall. Chairs be damned!
By midnight, with our legs tired from standing, our bellies full, and our livers earning their keep, everyone went home. I felt exhausted, less from the frenetic religiosity and the crowds than by being on my feet for 10 hours. The next day, the frenetic religiosity and the crowds would prove they could exhaust me too.
Sunday, then. The big one. Saturday’s rained-out processions had left a whole city craving more god. We get a late start, pacing ourselves. We don’t leave to see the first procession until almost 4 p.m, half-running across the city to make sure we’re in a particular plaza at a particular moment. Antonio knows Sevilla’s old city perfectly, its millennia-old Moorish map imprinted on his brain. It’s a cool but sunny day, and the streets throb with excited families waiting along the procession routes. The air hums with a now-familiar excitement. It’s happy and busy and sweet, and it makes getting around extremely annoying.
We seem to always be moving against traffic, by which I of course mean against 5,000 people heading toward the Cathedral. But I trust Antonio, and follow as closely as is possible. Like a strict father with his wayward child, he’s constantly looking over his shoulder for me as I try to take a photo of some kid playing with a ball of wax or a spectator stuffing their face with Cheetos. His friend has joined us too, a handsome farmer who looks like Walton Goggins with a deeper tan, and who shares Antonio’s urgency. Antonio’s pregnant wife shares my irritation at being needlessly rushed, clicking her tongue and sighing at every insistence to hurry up.
Why did we leave the house only 30 minutes before the parade, I want to ask? We had spent the day lazing around, nursing hangovers, having lunch, having a cheeky hangover-helping beer or three. If we’d given ourselves even 15 more minutes, there would be no rush.
No matter, we soon arrive at the plaza to join a few thousand people who had exactly the same idea. We’re at the back of the crowd, near a bakery, and press our backs against its windows into the only remaining space available. The nazarenos are already passing and somewhere out of sight I can hear the music that follows the paso, which means it’s close. Which means I’ll only be pressed into this glass for at least 20 more minutes. I’m sweating, due more to a hangover and having 15 people squeezed up against me than from the outside temperature. It’s incredibly uncomfortable. I hate god, I decide.
But then that same familiar magic descends on the square. The paso jiggles into view, the horns behind it start to swell, the crowd goes silent and watches with its single held breath to see how far the paso will make it. It shuffles and jostles—its candles and virgin shaking and flopping around on top of 50 pairs of shoulders—halfway across the square, then stops.
The stopping is also a kind of magic: the plaza explodes with applause, whoops, shouts. The band takes a breather too, and the sounds of the music are replaced with a thousand excited conversations. Que rico, que bueno, que magnifico, que so on. The break lasts about five minutes, during which the exhausted porteros are passed huge jugs of water. The bottom of each paso is covered with a large curtain or sheet, so that only the socked feet of the carriers can be seen, except in these breaks. Then, one or two of the porteros flops on the ground, the sheet lifted to let some air in. The men underneath are dressed identically (classic Sevilla), in dark pants and white shirts, a coloured towel wrapped around their neck. Most are in tank tops, but those with sleeves have their sleeves rolled up to hold their cigarettes. They are drenched in sweat, which I appreciate. They take turns gulping water.
The end of the break is signaled with a wooden knocker on the paso. A processional leader bangs it once, and the curtain drops while everyone beneath shifts into position. People in the crowd begin shushing. A second knock and you see the paso jostle slightly as the men step up with their shoulders into the bars, ready to lift. More shushing. The third knock is answered with a communal grunt and the paso shoots upward, sending candles and decorations tumbling. The crowd cheers. Then the paso starts its slow shuffle forward once more, and the band starts to play.
Another pattern reveals itself: no sooner has the paso left the plaza than the entire crowd does too. There’s another procession to get to a few blocks away, so we push through to get to a quieter side street to rush to the best spot to stand still and wait for it to go past. In this one, the nazarenos wear fantastic moody purple hoods to go with their white cloaks. The sun is already starting to set, and the dimming light casts long shadows and cranks the spookiness up to 11. (That’s when I thought the Spooky Scale only went to 10, and that 11 was an exaggeration. The scale would be expanded several times more that day.)
We are, if anything, slightly early for this one, and I get to enjoy a few pleasant minutes just mulling about on a not-entirely-jam-packed sidewalk. The purple procession quickly loses its air of spookiness under closer inspection. The nazarenos are carrying huge white candles, six feet tall, and cupping their hands tenderly around the flame to keep it lit. A man walks up and down between them, lighting those candles that have gone out. And all around the street, children swarm with balls of wax.
There’s so much to explain about Semana Santa and its many rituals that that my gracious hosts had forgotten to mention this one, its most charming. In addition to being handed candy from the nazarenos, children collect drops of wax throughout the week from these long candles. The ball of wax starts as a little cork ball when a child is just four or five years old, and grows to the size of a softball over the years. I’m standing by two or three families with young kids, which you can tell because their balls of wax aren’t that big. It’s like rings on a tree. The kids wander freely in the procession, tugging on the white sleeve of a pilgrim and holding out their wax balls. Most nazarenos say no with a shake of the hood, but one in every 10 that passes by will lower their candle and the kid will hold up their ball of wax and one or two drops will fall and that’s it. Very little is said in these moments, deliberately I suppose. It’s all meant to be solemn, but it reads as overwhelmingly sweet, almost cute. Maybe this god character is alright.
It’s more than half an hour until the purple procession’s paso passes (that was unavoidable, sorry), and this half hour is the most pleasant I spend during Semana Santa. The light is wonderful, the photos excellent, the mood friendly, the personal space respected. It’s the most subdued procession we see that day, and I feel like I’m starting to get this whole thing. Christian or not, believer in god or not, that doesn’t especially matter here. This is a family—no, a community—no, a whole-city!—event, a way of coming together and sharing a space, of tolerating busyness, overcrowding, and dust storms altogether. Against the backdrop of the KKK-style hoods (these inspired those, one hopes), it’s jarring and strange but generally just … nice. It’s just really, really nice.
But this procession is over, as far as we’re concerned. Antonio is signaling to me that it’s time to go. There’s more to see. We switch back into hustle mode and head toward the main square, within spitting distance of the Cathedral. This is Holy Ground Zero. Every procession must pass along the same specific route into and out of the Cathedral, in the heart of Sevilla’s old city. On either side of this route, a kilometer on either side of the Cathedral, temporary bleachers have been erected as seats for certain well-connected or wealthy families. Or old people. It’s a bit unclear how someone gets one of these seats. I’m not destined for one in my lifetime, so they serve only a single function: obstructing half of the walkable area. Practically speaking, this has a huge impact on the next two hours of my life.
Antonio has earmarked one of his favourite processions (of the day) as a must-see (one of seven of the day), but it’s across the main procession route from where we watched the purple one. There are two ways to get to the square: walk around the entire old city, or queue to cross the street. We choose the later, and wait between metal barriers for 20 minutes to be allowed to cross, then funnel into a plaza too full to allow us entry. We squish. More squish behind us. The world comes to its now-familiar standstill as off across the plaza a paso enters, horns blare, etc. Applause, shushing, applause. It’s probably beautiful. I can’t see a thing. When it’s over, we turn around and cross the street again, waiting 30 minutes this time. We catch another procession accidentally while waiting to cross, and then after some sweating and pushing emerge into the open night air on a dark street.
Processions come and go. There are at least three more that night. There are drinks to be had along the way, some desperate leaning on door frames or the outer walls of the bar. Feet start to ache, then calves and thighs and lower backs. Standing and walking all day, drinking only booze—it gets tiring. We eat something along the way, or we must have? Sandwiches, I bet. They eat a lot of sandwiches in Sevilla, and cod in its ten thousand Spanish forms, all mediocre. At one bar, we spot a huge ball of wax—years of work—left behind on a table. A few minutes later a child of about 10 or 11 comes bursting through the door, eyes wet, darting from table to table. Antonio hands him the ball, the child screams sweet relief and runs back out into the night.
By now it’s nearly midnight. In the dim streetlights the processions are even spookier, but they’ve got nothing on what’s about to come. We’ve had our last drink of the night at a tiny corner bar and head towards a main street to catch the final procession of Palm Sunday. Antonio now tells us that this is his favourite, but he’s at the stage of the night and level of alcohol in which he starts dancing like a bullfighter and constantly clapping out the beat to a flamenco only he can hear, so I take this with the grain of salt it deserves. We find a perch/learning spot against a restaurant we had leaned inside of earlier that day. Nazarenos dressed entirely in black are slowly marching past, carrying long black candles. As they pass, the city becomes utterly silent, a silence deeper than any that have come before. Even Antonio’s clapping trails off.
Then, as soon as the procession turns a corner onto a main street, all of the streetlights are turned off at once. The only light is the faint glow of the candles and in the near-pitch darkness sounds are weirdly amplified and the loudest thing is the soft shuffling of robes and the gentle padding of feet on the wax-covered street. The paso silently slides into view and drops for a break. Nothing stirs. Moments pass in this near-total darkness and almost-total quiet, and then the knocker sounds one, two, three—low grunt—and the procession moves quietly on. But then—then!—the music from the band rises out of the shrouded street. Soft and melancholy, it hangs in the smoky air longer than usual. But eventually it too is gone, and the city and its waxed old streets finally go to bed.
Semana Santa is exhausting. We arrived home around 3 in the morning the night of the spookiest darkest procession, and Antonio and his wife were both awake and taking calls for work at 9 a.m. The pace at which life is lived here is something to behold, full-throttled until it isn’t, calm until it’s time to go go go.
That pattern exists at all times in Sevilla, but is heightened during Semana Santa. That is to say, Sevilla is always a little bit exhausting, with its endless options for eating and drinking and dancing and singing and walking and just enjoying a happy and fulfilling life. Every time I visit, I’m entranced and energized for the first few days and then, somewhere around day four, when I start to pickle and the lack of sleep is making me see double, I am desperate to escape. Then a few days later I’m telling anyone who will listen how much I love and want to be back in Sevilla, but how I’d never live there because of how exhausting it is. And though this is how I always feel about Sevilla, I’ve never felt it to the extremes that I did during Semana Santa.
And impossibly, there are many more days of this planned. It’s a holy week, after all. The next morning Antonio is laying out the schedule for more processions and atheist me is starting to pray for some divine intervention.
The weather remains grey and grim in Sevilla, and then turns a corner to become fully miserable. Processions begin to be cancelled for the final afternoon and evening I’m in town. My heart swells, and I feel badly about this, but only slightly. I head to the airport in the evening against a backdrop of rain on the Andalusian plain, and I’m gone. The rain in Sevilla doesn’t let up. A couple of days of processions are cancelled outright. This is viewed by the majority as a tragedy. It makes the national news, the distressed faces of priests and penitents alike expressing abject disappointment.
I wonder if the cancellation comes as something of a relief to some people? Not the nazarenos or the porteros, for whom the procession is a distinct right of passage. Not the churches or the makers of the pasos, who have spent months preparing. Perhaps not even the children with their balls of wax on that high shelf in their bedroom. But surely, some of the exhausted watchers must welcome a day to rest their feet and not be pressed into a square with a thousand other hot and tired people waiting for a few brief flashes of a holy thing. Surely they would welcome a breather?
Semana Santa has its detractors, of course. Not everyone I spoke to was planning their days around the processions, and friends even talked about distant cousins and mere acquaintances who actively fled Sevilla during the festival. This meant that some folks were—if not strongly opposed to—not enthralled by the whole thing. But for those who stayed in Sevilla during Semana Santa, that communal suffering seemed to be part of the appeal. Let’s push this way to see that, they say. Let’s jam into this too-small space. Let’s stay up too late, be a bit too tipsy, they say. They say it wearily, but with one voice.
