Having a lark - Carnival in Majorca

Two years ago, the weekend of February 22/23 was when we celebrated the last festivities before we were locked up. Three weekends later, and the state of alarm declaration was made. With hindsight, those festivities assumed an eery quality - a final expression of fun prior to a Lent of enforced abstinent existence. As Carnival weekend coincided with my theatre group's "panto", we entered the parade. We won a prize - 300 euros. It was to take Alcudia town hall a while to make official the prize-winners and hand over the cash. It was passed on to the Food Bank. Lent was over by then, but there were plenty of people whose abstinence was not of their choosing.

Carnival is about dressing up. There are floats and there are parades. Essentially frivolous, one can of course rummage through history to discover more serious roots. But in the present, it goes little further than just having a good time, and certain traditions surrounding Carnival are plain daft. The mock funeral procession for the burial of the sardine in Portol (Marratxi) on Shrove Tuesday is one such display of glorious silliness. Portol's is the best known, but there are funerals elsewhere - gentlemen dressed as undertakers and women in black sobbing into handkerchiefs.

In certain villages, one-time customs for Carnival would seem to no longer be practised. In Alcudia, the "last days" before Lent were when a young man of the village would be captured and carried to the marsh by young women. Albufera, the marsh, can still be detected reasonably close to the pueblo, but there is less of it than used to be the case. That's because they built on it.

Carnival was a time when things were thrown at each other. Pink flour was popular, while in the villages by the wetlands - like Alcudia and Sa Pobla - they chucked bullrush.  Smelly water was another possibility. Whole oranges could be launched, as could onion powder, designed to make eyes stream. And there was also the bull dung.  

Simple pleasures from simpler times, one might say. And the simple pleasure of dressing up and donning costumes is what prevails for a celebration that was first noted in Majorca only shortly after the Conquest. Jaume I entered Madina Mayurqa (Palma) on New Year's Eve 1229. One of his first acts was to divide up the conquered land. Property of the defeated was to be distributed. The process ended at Easter in 1230. Its starting-point, as officially recorded, was "Carnestoltes".

The papacy of Gregory I, Saint Gregory the Great, was from 590 to 604. It is sometimes said that it was Gregory who established Lent, but there had been others before him. Irenaeus of Smyrna, who passed away in 202, wrote to Pope Victor I, who died in 199, about the nature of the fast before Easter. Irenaeus referred to forty hours. When this was translated from Greek into Latin, it would seem that something got lost in translation. It became forty days. By the time of the Council of Nicea in 325, the forty days of Lent were being expressly referred to.

Anyway, Gregory, almost three centuries later, was apparently the first to come up with the term Carnes Tollere, forbidden meats, and Carnestoltes was how this was modified in Catalan and adopted as the old word for Carnival. By the sixteenth century, "Carnaval" and "Carnestoltes" were interchangeable. The two words appear side by side in a 1530 document from Soller. Over the "last days" in Soller, they went out to make some noise and play some pranks.

Carnival, because it came to be a time for pranks and a fair amount of debauchery, developed an uneasy relationship with authority. It is perhaps remarkable to realise that Carnival was banned for decades by the Franco regime. In Palma, there were small parties for children, but no more than these. It was 1980 when the Rua parade was revived and 1982 when the town hall took on the task of organising it, the Rua having first been staged in the early part of the twentieth century.

A reason for the ban was to prevent disguises. These could be for subversive purposes, and so the Franco prohibition was in line with bans from the past. In 1548, for example, a ban on disguises and the wearing of masks was declared. Felipe V, who reigned for 46 years (save for a few months in 1724) until 1746, believed that masked balls were an offence against God and the decency of the Spanish nation. His ban wasn't lifted until 1788.

By the twentieth century, however, masked balls were so popular that the programme for balls in Palma stretched over a six-week period from January. Once there was one, the Rua, which had been predated by costume parades from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, took a course very similar to that of today. Except there isn't a today. Rua's off for another year. Covid prohibition. But not everywhere. In Alcudia, someone might just chuck some bull dung. For a lark.

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