Sardinian Carnevale Has No Place for Beads or Glitter

March 13, 2020 7:37 AM

Carnevale—the last chance to eat too much, drink too much, dance too much, live too much—before the austerity of Lent is marked the world over by revelry and ribaldry: Think Brazil’s thumping parades, Venice’s masked pomp (though it was canceled this year - PBS.org), New Orleans’s gaudy spectacle. In Barbagia, beads and glitter are nowhere to be found. There are far too many cows to chop up and strangers to whip. (Atlas Obscura)

More from Atlas Obscura:

Sardinia (Wikipedia) has a long history of freedom from outside influence, and every village has evolved its own pre-Lenten code, each valley pocket of its own traditional dress, rituals, and masks. The two themes for the celebration shared across the region are cattle and bedlam. In Mamoiada (Go Nomad), the little girl was frightened by the mamuthones, who wear pear-wood masks, animal pelts, and 60 pounds of cowbells, and create a racket in the streets as they're led through by white-masked issohadores like cattle to slaughter.* In Ottana (Merdules.it), the locals dress in bull head masks, and are accompanied by handlers called merdules who wear frowning black masks and animal skins that might be passed down from one generation to the next. In Lula (Sardegna Grandi Eventi), roving bands of men wear black cloaks, carry whips, and designate one person to be the official victim, or battileddu. This individual takes on the role of a freshly slaughtered cow and wears the dispatched bovine's horns as his own, its stomach lining for a hat, and its steaming heart as a belt buckle. The rest of the band then drive the victim through the town with real bullwhips—while also taking swipes at both gawking locals and what few tourists show up, for good measure.

The festivities generally begin with a bonfire on the Feast of Saint Anthony, on the night of January 16. The macabre festivities then recur for a month of Sundays, culminating on the weekend before Shrove Tuesday, and then another bonfire and more revelry on the day itself. And when it’s all done, everyone goes home to take off their masks, wipe off the blood, remove the heavy weights, and wash the soot from their faces. The next morning, of course, is Ash Wednesday, when the rest of the Catholic world dons its ashes.

* The roots of the Sardinian carnevale practices are uncertain. Some sources have suggested that the black masks and smearing of soot on faces depict a local victory over Arab Muslim forces. Because this practice could be dehumanizing or akin to blackface, which has a history in the celebration of carnival in various parts of the world, we have updated the photos in this story.

More from Sardegna Turismo: The mysterious beauty of Carnival in Sardinia -- Identity and passion, tradition and beauty, power and mystery, these are the characteristics shared by the island’s many carnival celebrations, characteristics that distinguish a feast whose roots are buried deep in the Nuragic Age (Wikipedia)

posted by filthy light thief (5 comments total)

Thanks! I'm going to turn Carnevale into a home-school topic! I'm new to home schooling during a pandemic and this looks perfect! Those Sardinian masks!!
posted by amanda at 8:57 AM on March 13, 2020

Sounds just gruesomely right for this time of plague.
posted by mermayd at 9:31 AM on March 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

Oh I just got back from two weeks of field-work (linguistics) in the interior of Sardinia. I was very sad to miss carnival by so little. A land of shepherds and megalithic structures. The place was incredible: a landscape that was unique. . . strange and beautiful; incredible food that was always, always literally farm to table; and like everywhere I have been fortunate enough to be able to travel to, full of wonderful people. I'll share this nugget from my work:

Sardinians are pastorialists by long tradition. There are no wolves in Sardinia, so the animal they fear most is the fox, which they will not tell me the "real" word for, since it is taboo. Instead, they have many other words they use, some of them coming from the languages spoken there in pre-history (or even as far back as the stone-age): loɖɖu, groɖɖe, and the name Maryanne, which for them is Mrezhanne. Or, they just talk about mazzone, which is the word for club, and refers just to the fox's tail. I tried to track down the origin of the story for fox=Maryanne, but it seems to have been lost to the sands of time.
posted by os tuberoes at 10:21 AM on March 13, 2020 [10 favorites]

This event is almost exactly like a Thomas Ligotti story from Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe . I don't know which one. It could be all of them.
posted by Dmenet at 11:39 AM on March 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

Whipping people for a holiday ?

That's a Lupercalian
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 12:48 PM on March 13, 2020