CHAPTER XVIII
Holy Week in Seville—What not to see—The Blessing of the Palms—Cathedral dignitaries—The Cardinal and the children—The Dean’s smile—The Cathedral steps—The Entry into Jerusalem—Light in dark places—Mozarabic ritual—The Display of the Banner—Our Lady of the Old Time—Mozarabic art—The Banner of the Menestrales—A portrait of San Fernando—The Roman eagles—The Entombment—The silver shrine and its golden key—Wheeled traffic forbidden—Brotherhoods, rich and poor.
I suppose My Spanish Year would be incomplete without a chapter about the Holy Week ceremonies and the Seville Fair; but so much has already been written on these subjects from the tourist’s point of view that, if I am to say anything about them, I must try to describe some characteristic features which are apt to pass more or less unnoticed.
Every one knows that during Holy Week numerous Brotherhoods and Guilds pervade the streets of Seville and other Andalucian towns in procession, the original intention of which was to show images representing events in the Passion of Our Lord, in order to bring home to the illiterate people the tragedy of the Crucifixion. And every one who sees these processions in Seville remarks on the artistic merit of many of the images, the magnificent dresses, and the picturesque effects produced in the streets and in the Cathedral by the innumerable candles flickering round the platforms on which the images are borne.
These are the common-places of Holy Week in Seville. They catch the eye of every visitor who has the slightest knowledge of or feeling for art; but long before the week is out, those who come merely to see something new are sick to death of the eternal repetition of the same thing—the “Brothers” or the “Nazarenes” in their voluminous robes and tall peaked hoods, the brass bands, the Civil Guard, the first paso draped with velvet or satin, and surrounded with silver candelabra and vases of flowers, with an image of Our Lord in the centre; more Brothers or Nazarenes, more music, more Civil Guards, and then the paso of Our Lady, which closes every procession save some which were instituted before the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin became a dogma of the Roman Church.
When one has seen between twenty and thirty of the pasos, all creeping along at a snail’s pace, with a pause every few yards for the bearers to rest and the people to admire, one does begin to get a thought weary of certain features in them. But we who know Seville have learnt what to see and what to avoid, and we are careful not to exhaust ourselves physically and mentally by attempting to watch the slow progress of a dozen pasos past the same point on the same day, for indeed the processions are but one feature in the manifold ceremonies of Holy Week, and if you set about it the right way you may vary your emotions almost every hour of the day.
Therefore I, who have often felt sorry to see my compatriots enduring the maximum of fatigue to see the minimum of what is most interesting in these curious survivals of the early Church, will try to indicate a few incidents in the long programme of ecclesiastical ceremonies which do not figure in the official account of what are incongruously described as las fiestas de Semana santa.
The Blessing of the Palms on Palm Sunday is one of the most beautiful of all the Cathedral ceremonies. I go early—not later than 8 a.m., and as much earlier as I find convenient, and when the early Mass is over I go across to the Columbus monument in front of the south door, and there get a perfect view of the procession on its stately march down the long aisle to the door of San Miguel. First goes the bearer of the Cathedral cross, its brass gleaming above the curious round frame here used to drape the parish crosses with the ritual colour for the day. Then follow the minor clergy in black soutanes and stiffly starched rochets with flowing sleeves; the censer-bearers in beautiful dalmatics of old brocade, swinging chased silver censers worthy of a place in a museum; the choir boys in scarlet soutanes and white rochets; the beneficed clergy—recently granted, as a special favour to the Cardinalate of Seville, permission to wear red silk linings to their black silk cloaks (capa corál); the portly canons in purple silk, the officiant and his servers in magnificent embroidered vestments centuries old, and then, supported by the Dean and the Arch-priest of the diocese, the Cardinal-Archbishop.