Manacor’s giants and dancers - how the Dominicans shaped a town’s heritage

There was an earlier celebration three weeks ago. This was during the fiestas for Sant Domingo - Dominic de Guzmán, the founder of the Dominican Order - and as such was somewhat peculiar. Domingo’s feast day is August 8. So, why were they holding fiestas for him in May? Well, they used to be in August - in Manacor, that is. Right up until 1963 in fact. But after a seven-year hiatus, the fiestas re-emerged and they were in May. The new date owed nothing whatsoever to Domingo other than the fact that, where the people of Manacor were concerned, he had the misfortune to have a feast day in August. By 1963, it had become abundantly clear that the residents of the town were taking themselves off to the coast in August - Porto Cristo in particular - and that they weren’t minded to nip back just because of a saint, however important he was.

The month of May it therefore was, but well before 1963 they had ceased to use the Sant Domingo Convent. In the same way that the vast Sant Domingo complex in Palma was completely destroyed after the ‘confiscations’ ordered by the Spanish prime minister Juan Álvarez Mendizábal in 1835, so the Manacor convent met the same fate. By 1837 it no longer existed. But as luck would have it, for the Dominicans, a separate convent was spared. This was for Sant Vicenç Ferrer, himself a Dominican who lived from 1350 to 1419.

This convent survives, but as with the surviving Domingo convents, e.g. Pollensa, it is a testament to a singularly unpleasant past. The Dominicans had form when it came to the Inquisition, and Sant Vicenç, who was from Valencia and apparently always preached in the Valencian language, had been instrumental in the 1391 pogrom of Valencia’s Jewish quarter which had predated the founding of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition but did coincide with an earlier version. Sant Vicenç reckoned that Jews were “animals with tails and menstruating like women”. Charming.

Coming back to the giants, the May celebration had been at the Sant Vicenç Ferrer Convent, just as the exhibition during the fair is also at the convent. This connection serves to highlight how certain traditions in Mallorca come to be woven into a religious fabric, even if it is nowadays one from the past. Documentation regarding the giants shows that they date from 7 December, 1823. This was documentation from the convent, the Sant Domingo Convent.

The giants would seem, therefore, to have been a creation of the Dominicans, or under their auspices at any rate. And to understand their background, one has to go back to a decree of 1780 issued by Carlos III of Spain. Giants, as with other characters like demons and folk dancers, were common enough, but they were incurring royal (and church) loss of favour because they weren’t religious enough. They were too irreverent. Carlos’s grandson was Ferdinand VII, the absolutist monarch first deposed by Napoleon and then by the Liberal Triennium. When this three-year attempt at non-monarchical rule failed, one outcome affected fiestas. In Manacor in 1823, the giants were created in praise of Ferdinand and of absolutism. The Dominicans embraced this with enthusiasm. Manacor’s municipal archive notes that in the month of December at the Dominican Convent “some giant figures with grand illumination were placed”. They celebrated the return of the “enlightened” king.

At the fiestas in May, a new giant was unveiled. This was a character from the Mallorcan folk tales that were compiled by the Manacor priest Antoni Maria Alcover under his pseudonym Jordi des Recó. The name of the character was Pere Gri. Giants from Alcudia and Sa Pobla were in attendance to honour the new arrival, as also was a group of dancers - boy dancers, the Moretons.

Unique to Manacor, the Moretons and their dances date from 1855. The performances are for the Sant Domingo Fiestas and the dancers accompany the giants. They were founded, so it is believed, by Friar Pius Caldentey Perelló. From Manacor, he had gone to Italy but was commissioned by Pius IX to return in 1854 and reorganise the Sant Vicenç Ferrer Convent. Under the protection of the convent, the Moretons danced for the first time on the occasion of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. They, as with the giants, were intimately bound to religious orthodoxy and to the Dominicans especially.

Nowadays, things are very different. Dancers and giants are examples of cultural heritage. Convents are cultural centres. But the pathways to this heritage were one and the same.