Twelve Hours Of A Mallorcan New Year

New Year in a Mallorcan style. The bells will ring out, fireworks will go off, the cava will pop, the twelve grapes will be scoffed and DJ Deejay will prepare the decks for a sound avalanche erupting with 1980s nostalgia into the night skies of town centres. There is nothing specifically Mallorcan about this. The grapes are Spanish grapes. Tradition they may be, but they owe everything to the pursuit of commerce and to early twentieth-century vine growers in Alicante who picked up on what was then a recent but not widely followed practice and saw it as an excellent means of selling grapes from what had been an abundant harvest.

The grapes might be said to bring luck, but on New Year's Eve 785 years ago luck had run out for the Arabic occupants of old Madina Mayurqa. Jaume I of Aragon and his band of land-hungry followers from the mainland took what was to eventually be called Palma, completed the conquest of Mallorca, introduced Catalan and thus paved the way for 785 years of squabbles, primarily those to do with Catalonia and language.

It isn't everywhere that can tag the birth of nationalism onto its New Year celebrations. In Mallorca they can, assuming that is, that one adheres to a notion of nationalism as it applies to a small island in the Mediterranean which isn't a nation. But, and as is evident from a book by Antoni-Ignasi Alomar i Canyelles, 31 December is the date on which Europe's oldest national fiesta takes place. Its title says so: "L'Estendard, la festa nacional més antiga d'Europa". 

The fiesta (or festival) of the standard - the Catalan-Aragonese flag flown by the conquering army of Jaume I - is only truly celebrated in Palma, but as it is supposedly also a "national" event, there are mini-celebrations in the villages of Mallorca in the days before 31 December. Thanks to the Obra Cultural Balear, promoters of all things Catalan heritage, the festival has gone on tour. This evening, as an example, there will be a festival of the standard in Campanet.

It has become a fiesta that for some, as the title of the book suggests, is an occasion to assert Mallorcan nationalism, but over its centuries of celebration it has been interpreted in different ways, has been repressed and has gone through one lengthy period of decline, which followed the end of The War of the Spanish Succession and the passing of the Nueva Planta decree of the Bourbon King Philip V that dismantled the Crown of Aragon (of which Mallorca was a part) and did away with much of the associated ceremony. There still was a ceremony for the standard but it was far from being what it had been. It was hijacked by what some contemporary writers refer to as the "Bourbon occupation". In other words, it was made a "Spanish" celebration. So much so that the sermon - the fiesta has always been part religious, part secular - was delivered in Castellano, which mostly no one understood.

This decline continued through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. During the Second Republic from 1931, the fiesta was repressed. It was considered symbolic neither of Mallorcan nationalism nor as an extension of Catalan nationalism (the somewhat mythical notion of the Catalan Lands) but of Spanish conservatism and monarchism. It was, curiously enough, during the Franco regime that the fiesta started its comeback. Though the regime looked upon it in the same way that the Bourbons had - as a means of incorporating Mallorca into Spain - something rather odd was added to the celebration in 1965. This was the reciting of the poem "La Colcada", written in 1861 by the Mallorcan Pere d'Alcàntara Penya i Nicolau. It was odd because the poem alluded to how the fiesta had once been before the years of decline started by Philip V (of whom it might be said that Franco was something of a political descendant) and so to the days when the fiesta was marked by its grand procession of knights on horseback. Its opening line recognised that "as no one knows the story of our great King James", the poem would have to tell the forgotten story of the festival of the standard.

Now very much fully restored, the festival has become an occasion when divisions reflected in its varying interpretation and treatments over the centuries come to the fore. For the left-wing nationalists (who strangely might be deemed to be heirs to the Second Republic which had been against the fiesta) there are those cries of nationalism: history and politics are never far from the surface in current-day Mallorca. But for most people the fiesta is just that, a fiesta, a celebration. On New Year's Eve at midday in the Plaça de Cort the "La Colcada" poem will be read. Twelve hours later, the bells will ring out, grape growers will be rubbing their hands and the DJ (Juan Campos) will take over. A difference of twelve hours which sums up a Mallorcan New Year.