HOW MUCH CAN A HUMAN BEAR?
Quite a lot, apparently. And while all of us carry great burden – life, children, career, spouse, bills to pay – you name it, none takes a load like this. To put it bluntly, if you’d like to witness a real-life example of the difference between “figuratively” and “literally”, come to Antigua, Guatemala, around Easter. I promise an exceptional example of what REAL burden looks like.
To begin with, the participants, dressed in bright purple robes, carry huge structures weighing up to three tons of wood, metal, and plaster. Then, swaying from side to side in a slow, continuous rhythm, they advance laboriously through the ancient town’s narrow cobbled streets, and around its beautifully preserved colonial square. With 3,760 meter-high Vulcan de Agua acting as a dramatic background, the procession advances slowly under the weight of bulky ramps. The bright colors and rhythmic music can hardly hide the strain and hardship.
The ritual doesn’t happen every day and in every place. You need to travel very far and arrive just at the right time to view it. And to think I just happened to stumble upon it entirely by chance. I guess you can say I was very lucky.
Antigua’s Semana Santa
This is the “Semana Santa” (Holy Week) Easter Festival. Missionaries from Seville, Spain initiated this religious procession during colonial times. It commemorates the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Like the Antigua itself, the festival has changed little since centuries past.
As expected of a Catholic religious parade, each ramp mounts an elaborately decorated figure of Jesus, Maria, and the saints. The procession includes dozens of ramps of all sizes carried by thousands of brightly dressed participants. Women participate as well hauling only slightly smaller ramps with figures of Maria. With music, smoke and bright colors the scene is worthy of the word “breathtaking”.
Travelers from all around the world flock to Guatemala’s former colonial capital to witness the event, and book their travel months in advance. It was reported than hundreds of thousands descended on this little town this year (2017) alone. But these pictures were taken in 2008 when a couple of friends and I just happened to be around town for an entirely different reason – the start of a two-weeks-long of road tour of Guatemala (You can read another post on Guatemala here). We had no clue about what was about to happen and of course never heard about Semana Santa until we stumble upon it.
We took hundreds of photos – what else could we do? In hindsight, what surprised me the most was the accessibility of it. No barriers, no lines, no one to stop us from walking with the procession taking pictures at will. So we did while chatting with the participants and being part of the event itself.
I can only assume these sort of things can only happen in a small Latin American remote town.
More about fascinating Guatemala in future posts.