Mallorca's Palm Economy

Today is Palm Sunday, Diumenge de Rams, Domingo de Ramos, depending on your linguistic preference. Holy Week kicks off with the first of the processions and the blessings. Wherever you happen to be in Mallorca, a street is likely to be rammed; chock full of Ram-blers.

Integral to Holy Week though Palm Sunday now is, it had taken several centuries following events of the original Easter before the Palm Sunday procession caught on. It would appear that it originated in northern Italy around the start of the eighth century and proved to be that much of a hit that Rome soon gave it the official liturgical stamp of approval. Prior to palms, there had been a preference for olive branches, but Olive Sunday had been a relatively low-key event minus any blessing. Along with the introduction of the palm came the blessing as well.

It isn't known exactly how quickly the new Palm Sunday tradition spread to Spain, but by the second half of the ninth century it had been established, certainly in the town of Vic in the Barcelona province. It has had a palm market ever since 875 when the town first celebrated Palm Sunday and when Wilfred the Hairy was scaring off the last of the Moorish interests in the Vic vicinity.

As the centuries moved on, Mallorca came to play a key role in the Palm Sunday tradition of the Crown of Aragon. Palms of different varieties had long been exported to and planted in Mallorca, but what particularly interested Mallorca's regal rulers was the white palm, the one which, by then, had become central to the Palm Sunday procession. Mallorca, or so it would seem, proved to be perfect for the growing of palms with limited or no sunlight, though quite what it was that made Mallorca so special in this regard isn't entirely clear. But the fact was that the island became something of a centre for a type of palm growing that was specifically targeted at the Palm Sunday market (by now, very much greater than just Vic's).

In the fourteenth century the export of white palms to the mainland was in full swing. Thanks to research by Jaume Bover and Ramon Rossello into palms of Mallorca in the late Middle Ages, we know that the royal household was acquiring palm branches for Palm Sunday. In 1338 "the royal procurators paid one pound to the women Caterina and Fustereta, vendors of fruit, for two palm branches to be sent to the royal court in Perpignan for the day of the palm". In 1339, the royal buyers were back again and then in 1341 once more, and this time the order was larger. "The royal procurators paid one pound (lluira), fourteen shillings (sous) and ten pence (diners) to Pere Joan, a carpenter, for four palm branches to be sent to the royal court."

It looks as though Pere Joan may have got a raw deal. Going on 1338 prices, he should have at least expected two pounds for his four branches (albeit they may have not been as big as those purchased in 1338), but there again he was apparently regularly employed around the royal castle of Almudaina, so he probably had little cause to complain.

Palm-related export, not just of white palm branches but also dates and palm nuts, had in fact become very much a feature of Mallorca's economy by the thirteenth century. In addition to Perpignan, sales were made to Barcelona, Valencia, Nice, Flanders and England. The palm trade was a good earner back in the day, so when you stumble across some Ramming today, bear in mind that behind every good religious ceremony there is someone making a few bob - pounds, shillings and pence in old Catalan money.

* J. Bover i R. Rossello, "Palmes i dàtils a Mallorca: Segles XIII-XV", Bolleti de la Societat Arqueològica Lulliana, 64 (2008)

The Entry Of Christ Into Alcúdia

There was always something phoney about Easter. It was Christmas without the presents. Easter Sunday would loom and so would a hope that an oversight would be righted and that an old geezer with heavy boots and a woolly beard carrying a large sack of "Beano" annuals would make a reindeer-line for the chimney. It never happened. Easter was like Boxing Day; a total anti-climax.

Hunting for the chocolate egg (or better still, eggs) was small consolation. The buns with the cinnamony stuff on top were ok, but they weren't a pudding with sixpences inside it. Even the religious thing was all a bit bogus, as there were no Phil Spector or Motown carols LPs to be bought.

The religious thing didn't exactly play a huge part in our Easters. One Easter Sunday, totally against normal procedure, we all went off to church. It was clearly thought better of in subsequent years, as it never happened again. And for most people, Brits that is, one suspects the religious thing was - and still is - as inconsequential as it was to us. So much so, that there is much evidence to suggest that most Brits don't quite the get whole deal with Easter, as in, for example, being able to put a timeline on events.

Nevertheless, there was and is some sort of basic appreciation - cross, nails, no one in the tomb, raised from the dead, this sort of thing - but what of the appreciation of the, if you like, pre-match warm-up? Palm Sunday (and it's this Sunday, if you didn't know) barely even registered. We knew there was this business to do with a donkey and some palm leaves, but when Palm Sunday came around, it was, well, a Sunday.

A few years on from this deeply irreligious upbringing, and Palm Sunday was given a whole new lease of life. Not because of Palm Sunday as such, but because of Adrian Henri. One of the Liverpool Poets, Henri, with the group of which he was a member, the Liverpool Scene, recorded "The Entry Of Christ Into Liverpool". It caused a bit of a stir, but in so doing, it did add awareness of what Palm Sunday meant to a generation for whom it meant practically nothing.

The recording was made five years after Henri had completed painting his scene with the same title. It was a homage to James Ensor's "The Entry Of Christ Into Brussels" that the Belgian had painted in 1889. Unlike the poem set to music with the Liverpool Scene, Henri's painting had been largely overlooked, but once John Peel started playing the song repeatedly, so the painting assumed greater prominence.

Henri's theme, as had been Ensor's theme, was the "Second Coming" in a Palm Sunday scene for a very different time and a very different location. There was an element to it of it having been a precursor of the cover of The Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's" album. Among the various characters depicted were The Beatles themselves as well as those from the world of jazz, such as George Melly and Charlie Parker.

What made the painting, however, was its satire. In Henri's Palm Sunday, Christ is almost a peripheral figure. His entry into Liverpool has been hijacked by demonstrators against this and that - a large banner proclaiming "long live socialism" dominates the painting - and by the corporate world. Indicative of its time, prominent advertisers are Guinness and Colman's Mustard. Forward from the early 1960s to today, and the corporatism would be that much more extreme; immediate worldwide coverage would demand enormous advertising rates and a group of Official Sponsors Of The Second Coming.

This, though, would be the cynical attitude in a country without religion. In Mallorca, it would be different. Wouldn't it? Easter is, you may have noticed, a pretty big deal of adherence to religious tradition and little else. Even Palm Sunday's a big deal, assuming any palms are left. Perhaps it should be renamed Red Beetle Sunday. But were Christ to suddenly reappear and make an entrance into, shall we say, Alcúdia, would the temptation for rampant religio-commercialism be spurned? No, it wouldn't. In an imaginary remake of Henri's scene, The Entry Of Christ Into Alcúdia would feature a damn great TUI blimp hovering over Sant Jaume church. You would be barely able to make Christ out for the guests who had paid several grand per head for a ticket, straining to get their faces into camera shot.

Irreligious cynicism may not exist in Mallorca, but create the right money-making opportunity and it would. And as for Christ himself, what would he charge for image rights? God knows.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.