Semana Santa

Easter week in Latin America is big. Big processions with huge numbers of followers carrying enormous effigies of Christ and the Virgin, showing them off to the populace, the atmosphere heavy with clouds of incense and solemn dirges so mournful. These processions started four weeks before Easter week, getting bigger and more extravagant the closer to Easter it became. By Good Friday, the effigies were the width of buildings, with up to 80 bearers straining and sweating under their immense weight; the processions lasting for up to 20 hours. For every procession, groups of families, friends, schools and associations diligently work for hours along the procession route creating carpets made of brightly coloured sawdust, leaves, flowers and fruit. Once completed, these offerings await their fate; the swaying effigies and endless files of purple-robed processors bearing down upon them, instantaneously sweeping the delicately placed rose petals and carefully moulded sawdust patterns underfoot, trampling them to death.

It wasn’t until the last moment that I actually remembered that our tradition of celebrating Easter comprises of stuffing ourselves with more chocolate than any reasonable person would ever consider buying, let alone feeding the hyperactivity receptors of millions of children on Easter Sunday! So we were chocolate free this year. Understandable considering the only so-called chocolate available is the despicable Hershey bar.


Semana Santa for me kicked off in Copan, Honduras, where I met up with Aryeh, one of the other Artcorps artists, who is doing theatre workshops in El Salvador. We marvelled at the Mayan ruins, wined and dined, soaked ourselves in hot springs where a steaming, boiling waterfall flows directly into a deliciously cool river; the two temperatures blending to form a perfect bath. We went horse riding on two very sorry looking small steads, but our lovely guide took us to a Mayan ceremonial site, which was very special indeed. Only discovered in the last few decades, it was a birthing ground, complete with stone carvings of sacred animals believed to aid fertility and a stone bed and maternity seat for actually delivering the child. Quite beautiful.
After Copan, we returned to Antigua, where I had more visitors, which was fanastic. My first visitors from the UK; Lawrence and Louise dropped by to experience the famed Antigua Semana Santa celebrations, and after 2 days of enough carpets, incense and processions to last a lifetime, we escaped to Lake Atitlan for a couple of days of tranquillity. Only that Lawrence managed to injure himself so badly falling down a staircase, he had to be rushed to the local hospital and ended up recuperating flat on his back for the rest of their holiday!