SETTIMANA SANTA IN BASTIA
From 20 April To 27 April
Religious holidays
Presentation
On this spring day, the sacristy has been transformed into a workshop. Children and adults bustle about in a happy hubbub. We discuss, we laugh, without ever losing sight of the palm models which, in the hands of the elders, holders of a know-how to be transmitted, will become e crucette, a lucky charm that everyone will distribute to their loved ones.
With rigour, patience and dexterity, the little hands fray the light yellow leaves, a symbol of purity, before attacking the weaving. In a few hours, more or less sophisticated crosses, but also stars, fish, ears of corn, even pullezzule, imposing art objects, will have taken shape. Tomorrow, as tradition dictates, these long and meticulous works will be blessed to accompany the ritualized marches of Holy Week (a settimana santa, as we say here), inaugurated by Palm Sunday.
BROTHERHOODS AND LIVING TRADITIONS
As mistresses of ceremonies, the Corsican brotherhoods reappear in their beautiful clothes! Weaving also the palms, they prepare to animate the parish services and lead the processions until Resurrection Sunday.
Created in a spirit of solidarity and guarantors, for centuries in Corsica, of local customs as well as a form of spirituality, these groups of men (sometimes mixed) are part of the religious landscape of Bastia. Each has its own neighborhood, its own dress codes, its patronal feast and its rituals, including the famous granitula!
To live from the inside, this nocturnal walk of Holy Week, practiced in Erbalunga, on the side of Cap Corse, at the northern exit of Bastia, follows the route of the marine shell whose name it bears, winding up to form a compact point, then unfolding while the confreres repeat the same song. While a cerca, another procession bringing together no fewer than four local brotherhoods, takes you 14 km from church to church through the hamlets of Brando.
And this is just a glimpse of everything that is played out over 8 days at the gates of Bastia territory as well as intramural!
Participate in a vigil in Pietranera, closely follow the catenacciu, a penitent who, under dawn and a hood, crosses the streets of Bastia with a heavy cross on his back, push the door of a chapel to discover one of these ephemeral decorations of local realization (i sepolcri), representing the entombment of Christ and welcoming in prayer, until late in the evening, many Bastiais… This is what Bastia offers you, in total immersion in the heart of the sacred!
IN SANTA MARIA DI LOTA BEFORE THE PICNIC
The office of darkness, mysterious and striking, still perfect, all lights off, the trip. Come listen to it blind! At Santa Maria di Lota, on the evening of Maundy Thursday, still in the hands of the confreres, it consecrates the victory of Christ over death in a tumult of percussion evoking the earthquake after the crucifixion. And might as well drive out the devil!
Finally, after the noise of the night, another procession by candlelight awaits you here, which ends on your knees, from the nave to the holy sepulchre. This umpteenth way of the cross, called e trescinelle, augurs a future during which the brotherhoods and parishioners of Figarella, Mandriale and San Martino di Lota will begin a four-hour journey. Leaving on the road and the paths, to the sounds of i canti e i lodi di u venneri santu, everyone will meet to form a guard of honor, a parata, as a sign of deference and piety.
Then will come Holy Saturday, the day of blessing of houses and of the new fire into which the branches of the previous year will be thrown. Then on Easter Sunday, with its traditional meal of lamb and sweets, led by bell tower (these large brioche crowns topped with a hard-boiled egg!). The houses will display their cheerfulness and the bells will ring the hour of the merendella, a picnic on Easter Monday in Corsican style that rhymes with renewal and resurrection.
