For me it's always an uncomfortable feeling to be supporting a bar trying to get happily drunk, when on looking up at the wall I am confronted not by the picture of a King, a President or some other worthy but by the weeping image of one of the many Virgin Marys who populate Seville all year round. I mean to say I don't go to a church and ask for a beer.

However the silly season is about to begin in Seville. There's a line of thought to suggest that it is always the silly season in Seville but the real one starts with Easter, continues with the Feria or April Fair which also opens the bull-fighting season, then comes communion madness, followed by a short rest period before the pilgrimage to El Rocio and then within a month it's the summer holidays. So it's down-hill from now on until October when work starts again in earnest, because every true Sevillano needs the month of September to recover from the festivities of April till August.

Easter or Semana Santa, which lasts the full week and in fact is getting longer year by year, as more and more Hermandades or Brotherhoods join the processions, is virtually impossible for an outsider to comprehend, especially if that outsider was brought up in the Protestant tradition. The centre of attraction, the star turn as it were during Easter is not Christ but the Virgin Mary. Shades of Louise Ciccone a.k.a..........................

The people of Seville hang images of their favourite Virgin (Macarena, Triana, Rocio are the most popular), but there are more, along with a tiny plastic football or a pair of miniature football boots in the colours of their local team from the rear vision mirror. Neither do much good, as the locals drive terribly and suffer the consequences and the local football team usually loses.

Additionally the typical Sevillano neck and or chest, both male and female, is festooned by gold crucifixes and images of the same Virgin who hangs from the mirror and who leers down at you disapprovingly from bar walls. She also pops up in shop windows, from behind the bank teller and keeps a tearful eye on totally corrupt politicians and equally totally useless public servants from her vantage point overlooking their desks if nor actually on it. Unfortunately these people are neither less corrupt or any more useful because of it. And this perhaps is the saving grace of the Sevillano, that for all their outward display of religiosity, they are totally irreligious. If you wander into a church on a Sunday, mistakenly thinking that it is a bar, everybody is up the back talking about the price of fish, what the stock market is doing and there is always at least one child murdering another at full voice and full throttle. A joyful scene.

It always seems to me to be a shame that more and more people make the family Sunday outing to a hypermarket to ogle at the goodies on display, lunch on the already half opened bars of chocolate and packets of crisps and kick a football up and down the aisles rather than to gossip and murder in church. Thomas a Becket would not have appreciated being stabbed in the back by the King's men between the shelves of dried fruits and condoms.

If you asked anybody the name of the Archbishop of Seville, you would be answered with a blank look, they don't even know by sight their local priest. That is not the case in Pays Basque, where the ecclesiastical hierarchy from the Archbishop to the poorest priest not only tend to the spiritual needs of their flock but also lead them lemming like in their national quest. They are important political figures who everybody knows and presumably respects. In fact it is said that the ETA separatist movement started in seminary.

The cult of the Virgin Mary is serious stuff in Seville, but apart from this religion doesn't penetrate the sleeve. Historically this is both understandable and paradoxically surprising. After the expulsion of the Jews and Arabs 500 years ago, Andalucia as a whole went into decline and the population was divided into two groups : a small minority of extremely rich landowners and a very large majority of extremely poor agricultural sometime workers. These workers had little to eat but they were fed a rich diet of religion to shut them up and keep them under control. There are instances of some sun-crazed peasant going berserk and killing a landowner, a priest or two or perhaps burning down a church. But little more, certainly until the beginnings of the civil war.

Interestingly enough Seville was chosen by Moscow in the early 30s or even late 20s to be the next European centre of the Bolshevik Revolution because of its proletarian stirrings and the gross oppression it suffered from. Envoys were continually scuttling backwards and forwards between the two cities until one year the Russian envoy happened to be in Seville during Easter and he was dismayed to see the oppressed workers who had for the whole year being spouting Bolshevik propaganda and organizing for the Revolution suddenly drop their hammers and sickles and pick up their Virgin Mary to lug around the city for twelve hours or more. This envoy wondered at that moment whether Seville had been the appropriate choice to spearhead to revolution into the rest of Europe. In fact this hotbed of unrest and workers organizations against oppression and poverty fell to General Franco s army in just one day. Equally true is the fact that in the period leading up to and during the civil war many churches were burnt to the ground and many priests were murdered. Seville is a city of paradoxes.

I had intended to pen a few lines about Easter but obviously got sidetracked so that will have to wait until another occasion. Now I think I ll head off to my local bar which on a blackboard daily counts the days to Palm Sunday. It now reads there are 18 days to go . Don't think for a moment that this blackboarding begins shortly before Easter. Not a bit of it, it begins the day after the finish of the last one and so could read there are 365 days to go. Actually my bar doesn't have a Virgin Mary on the wall, it has a Christ and my Christ is el Cristo del Gran Poder which roughly translates as the Christ of Great Power. In fact the patio of my house is adorned by a 100 year old ceramic tile portrayal of this particular Christ complete with two dimmish lights to fascinate passers-by at night. It reminds me somewhat of a bow-tie my uncle gave me on my tenth birthday complete with two small bulbs which lit up and amused the family and friends. It only needed to spin to be a real party stopper. But the mind is wandering and I feel the urge as a happily lapsed Protestant to drown my confusion and toast whatever Virgin or Christ I stumble upon.

Patrick
Seville
February 1999