It has to be said that there has never been a great clamour for doing away with the observance of saints’ festivities. There are now alternatives - Palma has two for Sant Sebastià - but for the most part a society that is way less religious than once was fully embraces the saints. They are part of the culture, they are tradition, even if they have tended to become excuses for parties rather than for spending time in churches. There is also a certain inviolability regarding the dates. To give an example, a few years ago, at least partly because of bad weather, a Palma councillor argued the case for moving Sebastià to the summer. After all, Palma didn’t really have a summer fiestas. The councillor, Aligi Molina of Podemos, received short shrift. Sebastià is January, always has been, always will be.
Palma does actually have a summer patron - the Virgin Mary, her birthday that is. Maria de la Salut on September 8 passes relatively unnoticed each year. But Palma does abide by a principle of male and female and indeed winter and summer, as the two seasons have influenced the choice of saints. They can both be male. This is the case in Algaida with Honorat and Jaume (Santiago), so there is no strict rule in respect of gender.
The notion of a winter and summer saint is well-rooted, even if there is only a limited number of municipalities with both. The former, as with Sant Antoni (who isn’t actually a patron), is linked to the rebirth of the land. The latter, one might think, owes something to protection from drought. But this tends not to be a reason. A winter saint can offer this protection just as well - Agatha in Sencelles, for instance. Drought, floods, pestilence; these can exist at any time. And the plague has done as much for devotion to patrons as have celebrations of victories over enemies, e.g. Pollensa’s La Patrona (Moors and Christians and all that).
Sebastià is a plague saint. But more than this, there is good reason to believe that he was once Mallorca’s winter saint. As such, he would have had high status, as there has never been a claimant to being an island-wide summer saint, perhaps because there are that many more who are well-known to choose from.
Devotion of Sebastià existed well before all the business with the bone of one of his arms having delivered Palma from the plague in 1523. In Catalan areas there had been a veneration since at least the ninth century. The Cathedral was ringing a bell on January 20 to mark the saint’s day years before the Archdeacon of Rhodes turned up with the relic. Powers of protection against the plague were a key reason. But if Sebastià had at one time attained an island-wide reputation, why did he come to lose it? While there are events for Sebastià across the island, they are nothing by comparison with those for Antoni. Pollensa is a curiosity in having retained rituals for Sebastià, but Pollensa goes big on Antoni like many other municipalities.
Felip Munar, professor of popular culture at the University of the Balearic Islands, once argued that the day of Sant Antoni should be a public holiday. Note ‘popular culture’, as Antoni, more than any other saint, offers full justification for the continuing centrality of religious festivities in a non-denominational society. He is revered by young and old, the young being especially evident in the large gatherings for the dances of Antoni and the demons in the likes of Arta and Manacor. These representations of the demonic torments supposedly suffered by Antoni owe considerably more to tradition than the correfoc. And one can argue that it is the deep roots of the figure of the demon in Mallorcan society that have made Antoni not just the de facto winter saint but Mallorca’s saint.
The animal blessings, the sympathetic appearance of an old man with a white beard, the association with the rebirth of the land. These are further reasons why Antoni came to supplant Sebastià and to the extent that he did. There is another reason. Sebastià would have been called on for protection against the plague in the villages of Mallorca, but crucially he became Palma’s saint.
Historically there were tensions between the ‘Ciutat’ (Palma) and the ‘Part Forana’ or ‘Fora Vila’ away from Palma. Antoni, whose cult originally flourished most in Sa Pobla and Arta, came to represent the Part Forana, the winter saint of a Mallorca that wasn’t the city.
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