The Last Of The Summer Melon

24 August is a feast day but it is also a day which epitomises religious violence - both legend and fact - that is the historical background to some fiesta tradition. The legend has to do with Sant Bartomeu, Saint Bartholomew the Apostle, whose feast day tomorrow is. There are alternative versions of his death, but the most popular (if this is the right word) is that he was skinned alive and then crucified (or possibly beheaded or maybe all three).

This gruesome end seems somewhat appropriate for what occurred some fifteen hundred years later on the day of his feast: the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. This occurred during the French Wars of Religion and the Huguenots were the targets. The 1572 massacre took place in Paris five days after the marriage of the sister of France's King Charles IX to the protestant Henry III of Navarre. Many Huguenots were in town. They would have wished that they hadn't been. Charles's mother, Catherine of Medici, is generally credited with having been behind the massacre, but others have been fingered by history, including Spain's Philip II, who was to later be the monarch behind the failed Armada.

While Saint Bartholomew's day is celebrated in Mallorca with the occasional violent burst of fireworks or cracks from demons' tridents - Consell, Ses Salines, Soller - it is a day of charming innocence in total and merciful contrast to the outrages perpetrated in the name of religion. In Alcúdia, there is a festival that originated in the town and which has spread to other parts of the island. It is the festival of the lanterns.

One says originated, yet in its recent incarnation the festival is comparatively new. As with other traditions that had for varying reasons disappeared, it was part of the revivalist movement of the late 1970s: a time when those forgotten traditions were being remembered and reactivated.

The festival is very simple. It involves melons (or peppers) being scooped out, faces carved and candles placed inside (other means of light are acceptable and can involve batteries). The watermelon is clearly preferable in order that the largest lanterns can be claimed. A fairly substantial pepper would be needed, but then there is always a place for mini-lanterns. The pepper, though, is something of a johnny-fruit-come-lately to the lantern scene, as the roots of the festival have to do with the melon.

Around this time of summer, the last of the summer melons are being harvested. There will still be enough for the good people of Vilafranca to consume in their famed melon-eating contest and to throw at each other during the equally famed melon battle of the town's fiesta/fair early next month, but generally speaking the melon is coming to the end of the summer line. And it was this that inspired the one-time predominantly farming community of Alcúdia to celebrate what it considered to be summer's end: approximately a month before everyone else.

The last of the summer melon had its poignancy and its sentimentalism. The children of the farming community would eat the final sweet fruit, but the melon's passing was something to celebrate as well. Hence, they made lanterns, and the lanterns' festival became a rather peculiarly pre-emptive lament for the passing of summer as well. The children would carry their melon lanterns through the streets and sing songs as they did so.

This is, as you can appreciate, a world away from the barbarity associated with poor old Bartholomew, but he could take solace from the fact that he was being appreciated in such a gentle fashion: one appropriate for an Apostle. Bartholomew's day was chosen because it coincided - approximately - with the final melon harvest.

It isn't known when the tradition actually started, but it is known that it had ceased to be by the start of the 1960s. It took the cultural association Sarau Alcudienc, along with the Obra Cultural Balear (OCB) promoters of Catalan culture, to bring it back. Sarau Alcudienc was in fact the Alcúdia offshoot of the OCB, and it was the lantern festival which was the reason for its formation. It has since become - and remains - one of Mallorca's most important cultural associations.   

The lanterns will be paraded from a quarter past nine tomorrow evening, but there's no need to go to Alcúdia. Do it yourself. It would be rather splendid if, at the same time, the whole of Mallorca lit lanterns. As a way of rejecting the unwanted symbolism of Sant Bartomeu. Religious violence.