The Hairy Saint John Without Hair

In Felanitx, Pollensa and Sant Joan he is known as Sant Joan Pelós. In Sant Llorenç he is Sant Joan Pelut. The meaning is the same - Saint John the Hairy. In Felanitx, such is the status of its Sant Joan that the dance has been declared a fiesta in the cultural interest. This means that there is an obligation for the tradition to be maintained and promoted in its traditional format. It also means that there is a degree of kudos attached.

The Felanitx John was responsible for one of the more amusing anecdotes associated with Mallorca's traditions. Or should one say not amusing, because a royal personage - Isabel de Borbón y Borbón, daughter of Queen Isabel II - was singularly unamused by him. So much so that when she visited Felanitx in 1913, she demanded to know who the idiot was who was dancing for her.

The dance is all important, and its origins appear to lie not with midsummer but with Christmastime, specifically the feasts of Saint Stephen, i.e. Boxing Day, and of John the Evangelist (27 December). Scholars point to the fact that at least until the sixteenth century there were rituals in the liturgy at Palma Cathedral in which Saint Stephen would appear on Boxing Day in a long tunic with his face covered. The following day there would be a repetition; this time involving John the Evangelist, who would wear a veil of white silk over his face.

Somehow, John the Baptist was added to this ritual. In contrast to the Evangelist, the Baptist had a mask and wore a hairy cape and sandals. In one hand he would hold a lamb. In the other was a cross on which were the Latin words "Ecce Agnus Dei" (Behold! The Lamb of God). Eventually, the combination of John the Evangelist and John the Baptist was incorporated into the ceremony for Corpus Christi, and the image of John the Baptist was the one which prevailed. Nowadays, if one is being strictly accurate, only Pollensa has maintained the Corpus Christi connection. The other Hairy Johns manifest themselves on Midsummer's Day, the feast of John the Baptist.

There isn't total consistency between the Johns and the celebrations. In the village of Sant Joan for instance, he is accompanied by a giant crow, the Corb Nofre, which emits fire. The crow is an entirely modern invention, introduced to add a touch more colour and mystery to the whole affair. The hairiness is generally shared, though this has passed with time to the head rather than the original cape of the mediaeval ceremony. But in Sant Llorenç there is no hairiness. Sant Joan Pelut sports a short back and sides.

Whereas Pollensa can trace its John back to at least the early seventeenth century, the spread of Hairy Johns across Mallorca, but most notably in its eastern part, wasn't especially evident until the end of the eighteenth century. In Manacor, its John first seems to have appeared in 1750 but disappeared some 150 years later. There were Johns in Son Carrió, Son Servera, Arta and Alcudia, but in the specific case of Sant Llorenç there is no documentary evidence of him until 1945. A bachelor of the village, it was explained, danced "furiously" and was accompanied by two demons.

As with other dancing Johns, the intention was to whip up mirth. A Catalan writer on folklore, Joan Amades, writing about Catalan customs in the 1950s, said that "the mission of the character is to plan the maximum possible humour; the more laughter, the better". Isabel de Borbón y Borbón might not have been amused, but the folk of the villages were.

The Sant Llorenç John is believed to have been based on Manacor's. But from the heady days of the 1940s, he went into decline, as did other Johns. Much has been said and written about the abandonment of traditions, with the onset of tourism and a regime not minded to actively promote Catalan customs chiefly attributed with having caused the decline. It has also been noted, however, that there was indifference. The people had, for a time, been amused, but they gradually stopped bothering, as also did those who arranged the traditional dances.

At the start of the 1980s there was the revival. In Sant Llorenç it was due to musicians and the person who became the Hairy John, Toni Santandreu. Today's John, Biel Nicolau, has the two demons as there were in the mid-1940s. But why, unlike others, doesn't he have the hair? Good question. And another is why he wears what looks like a mortar board. Mallorca's traditions are often highly idiosyncratic, and Sant Joan Pelut is a good example.

A Price On Prehistory: S'Illot

Where do you reckon was the first and most popular "chiringuito" (beach bar) in Mallorca in the 1960s? Playa de Palma perhaps, Palmanova possibly? Neither. It was, or so it is said, in S'Illot, the resort on the east coast that is shared by the towns of Sant Llorenç and Manacor. The chiringuito, which had remarkably enough opened in 1951, was known as Bar S'Illot, so there was nothing remarkable about the name, but it was a genuine beach bar back then as there wasn't anything between it and the beach. There is now, while Bar S'Illot assumed a new name earlier this year - Fifty Seven (and no, I don't know that there is any connection with Heinz).

That the bar should have been as popular as it was back in the day is surprising for two reasons; there was pretty much nothing and no one there and there was an almost complete lack of utilities. S'Illot was back-of-beyond Mallorca and when, in 1963, Jaume de Juan arrived in S'Illot, there was no electricity, no water and no telephone. There were a couple of hotels which ran off generators, to which was to be added Jaume's own hotel. He was honoured a few years ago for his contribution to tourism, having become a co-founder of the Mallorca hoteliers federation, and having shown that, along with the most popular beach bar of a bygone era, S'Illot was at the forefront of Mallorca's early years of tourism.

Why do I mention all this? The reason is to highlight the fact that tourism had humble roots and that it grew up in parts of the island which might have been unexpected. And in S'Illot there doesn't appear to have been any obviously thought-out plan for development in the early 1960s. Jaume de Juan has said that in 1963 he turned up in a Seat 600 bringing with him a shovel. There was a plot available and he got on with it, though one suspects there was rather more to it than a spot of digging.

It's a good yarn, nevertheless, and one packed with nostalgia for the fifty years which have passed since he began his hotel adventure and since the Bar S'Illot, now restored and renamed, was somehow defying its out-of-the-way location to have acquired the reputation it had. It's a yarn which also confirms the fact that there is a whole, largely untold story about Mallorca's tourism, one whose starting-points can be movable. To take S'Illot's as an example, though Jaume de Juan was to become the most celebrated of its hoteliers and the one who created a breakthrough for S'Illot as a resort, in the mid-1950s the first hotel to have opened in Cala Moreia was owned by one Pere Caldentey, a native of Sant Llorenç and, at the time the hotel was being built, the third-choice goalkeeper for Barcelona.

One can't call the people of the prehistoric talayot period tourists, but S'Illot has something of an oddball charm about it that is the result of having, only some 200 metres from the beach, a talayotic settlement. To be honest, you don't tend to get too many talayotic settlements more or less slap bang in the middle of a tourist area, but in S'Illot you do. But, and especially given where the settlement is, the modern day comes firmly into play, this modern day being in the form of land law, one that S'Illot tourism pioneers of the 1960s would not have given a great deal of attention to. In 1976, however, a national law was passed which, when applied to the prehistoric settlement, determined that it was green land liable to have to be expropriated. Over thirty years later, this law finally swung into action, and Sant Llorenç town hall came to realise that it had to expropriate the settlement's land, i.e. it had to pay the owners a market value, and the owners were the ones who pressed for the council to pay. Sant Llorenç is now in for some three million euros which will be paid in instalments. It could have been more, had a court been involved and arbitrated.

It seems bizarre that there can actually be an owner of a prehistoric settlement and that a local authority is legally obliged to hand over a fair old wedge for something it is already managing and which would surely not be subject to any form of development because of other laws. But bizarre is how things often are and how altogether more complex things are compared with the days when Jaume de Juan could take a shovel out of his Seat 600 and start digging.

* Photo of part of the talayotic settlement from the PDF from http://www.infomallorca.net