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.

MALLORCA TODAY - Melons to be added to Can Picafort's rubber ducks

No one in Can Picafort and Santa Margalida appears to agree with the ban on real ducks being released during the duck race of Can Picafort's fiestas on 15 August, but faced with it, the town hall has opted to add melons to the rubber-duck trophies to be swum for. The town hall had been hoping for a modification to animal-protection law to permit the return of real ducks.

See more: Ultima Hora

A Lovely Pair Of Melons

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them."

Vilafranca's annual melon fiesta and fair sadly does not last twelve nights. Were it to, then Shakespeare's line from "A Twelfth Night" would be more apposite. The fair lasts twelve nights divided by two. But greatness is, nevertheless, the theme of the fair. Greatness as in size. It matters.

Some melons are born (or rather grown) great, some achieve greatness (more than others) and some (of the growers) have greatness thrust upon them and proudly display it during the how-big-are-your-melons competition.

Showing off your melons should be the cue for a local version of Esther Rantzen to suddenly pop up with an hilarious (sic) feature for "Así Es La Vida" or, to be linguistically correct, "Així És La Vida". Simpering Cyril Fletcher would read a witty ode: "It was the competition for the meló més gros, and Tommy Morlà's meló was the grossest of them all. The gross greengrocer's contest in the village of Vilafranca, the melon 'le plus grand' in the lingua franca".

Tommy, or Tomeu to give him his usual name, has now produced the biggest melon on no fewer than five occasions. The king of the melons. Presumably he gets to keep the trophy. This year's offering was only slightly smaller, by 0.6 kilos, than the melon record-holder (a record held by Tomeu). Ooh er, missus, what a whopper.

A thing about melons is that you normally expect them to be melon-shaped. Typically, therefore, they are round or oval. The biggest melon in Vilafranca wasn't. It was more of a curved oblong. Indeed, the melon bore a startling resemblance to the biggest pumpkin in Muro during last autumn's how-big-is your-pumpkin contest, only not orange. Could it in fact be the same? A pumpkin in melon's clothing. We demand an answer.

Towns and villages across Mallorca are known for their agricultural specialisms; hence, Muro with its pumpkins, Sa Pobla with its potatoes and Vilafranca de Bonany, as it is grandly and fully known, with its melons. There should be a greengrocery guide to Mallorca and its "pueblos" and a whole new strand of alternative tourism. Forget sun and beach, here's the fruit and veg.

Such tourism might help to put Vilafranca on the map. It is on maps already, but clearly no one can find it as no one goes there. Few are likely to have even heard of the place. But were visitors to venture to Vilafranca during its melon fiesta, what fun awaits them. In addition to the biggest melon contest, there is also the melon-eating competition.

This year's winner, in the senior category, was one Pep Rosselló, who put away just under 1.8 kilos of melon in five minutes. Apparently, the secret of his success is, if you wish to try this at home, to chew and swallow. Which is pretty sound advice for most food that you put into your mouth. There is the additional bonus, where Pep is concerned, that he likes the fruit. It does help, one imagines. (If, by the way, you had read any reports of Pep's achievement in the Spanish press, you might have been forgiven for thinking that he had devoured 86 of Tomeu's 20.7 kilos of biggest melon; it's how it gets written, or at least I assume he didn't actually get through one thousand, seven hundred and ninety kilos.)

The melon-eating competition may be a bit potty, but at least it is an example of putting fruit to the purpose that it is usually intended, i.e. to be eaten, rather than thrown, which is what happens in Binissalem during its Vermar fiestas (later this month) when there is the great grape battle. There again, chucking melons at each other probably isn't a good idea, especially if they weigh over 20 kilos.

The melon fiesta is also traditional (in that 41 years of its celebration equates to being traditional), which is more than can be said for what will happen soon in the village of Bunyola which will stage its seventh come-in-your-underwear event. Cue Esther once more. Or probably not.

And the melon eating is testimony to the quality of the local fruit. According to the announcement of the MC prior to the "melon-off", the contest was to eat the "most famous melons in the world". So there we are. Vilafranca is on the map after all. It is on the globe. And the globe is melon-shaped, which in Vilafranca is like an oblong.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.