Holy Thursday in Seven Cities, Azores

The volcano crater of Sete Cidades, with its double lagoon: the Green Lagoon in the foreground, and the Blue Lagoon in the background. Seen from the Cerrado das Freiras.

We are in the almost most westerly parish of Europe. This is due to São José, in the freguesía of Fajã Grande, in the Isla de Flores of the Azores – of course, if we accept beforehand that these islands belong to Europe, despite sitting on the American plate. But where we are now is the westernmost parish of the Island of San Miguel, halfway between the Finis Terrae of the old continent and the coast of Newfoundland. Exactly, in the front of the church of San Nicolás, erected in the nineteenth century, in a particularly beautiful volcanic crater that bears the crowded-sounding name of Sete Cidades. Even though there are no cities here, and even of people there are very few. The name comes from the legendary Isla de las Siete Ciudades, the Island of the Seven Cities, never found, but very much alive in the literature and dreams of the cartographers, sailors and explorers of the Atlantic, described for centures in endless variations.


Any visit to these islands, with the omnipresent sea and harsh geographical conditions, evokes the world of the whales and whale hunters. Among the men and women who gathered on this Holy Thursday in the church of San Nicolás, few would not have had a family member who earned their bread hunting whales. Surely, too, most have had family members who emigrated to America. The two things used to go together. They called it “taking the leap”: to go out at night, clandestinely, on an American whaler, to have a job, and above all, to avoid the obligatory recruitment for military service. Under cover of darkness, when they were aware that an American whaling ship was nearby, the men who wanted a new life would light a bonfire on the rocks of the coast, and at this signal the captain sent a boat to enroll them. The presence of the Azorean whalers (or, as they were known in Nantucket and New Bedford, the men of the Western Islands) is recorded even in Moby Dick.


José Pecheco, Luís Silva: Canção de despedida (Farewell song). From the album Chants des baleiniers portugais de Faial, Açores (Songs of the whalers of Faial, Azores, 1958)

Whale hunting put roots in the islands from 1756 on, when the first whaling boat from New England circumnavigated the Azores. By 1880, a third of the 3.896 whalers of the New Bedford fleet were Azorean. At that time, the islanders themselves were developing a fleet and a local industry. It was relatively weak, almost artisanal, because they never had enough capital to compete with the American vessels. Only for a few years, beginning with 1951, did local whaling reach a significant industrial level (751 sperm whales and 16,000 barrels of oil in the same year), but it was very ephemeral: In 1957, with the destructive eruption of the Vulcão dos Capelinhos and the subsequent massive emigration, it went into rapid decline until its total cessation on August 21, 1987, when a group of men hunted the last sperm whale, a 15-meter leviathan, and processed it on the Isla de Pico. We’ll talk about it in a future post. Today there are very few old whalers, usually men of few words, testimonies to a way of life that, like so many others, will never come back.

Jueves Santo en Sete Cidades, Azores

Caldera volcánica de Sete Cidades, con su laguna doble: la Laguna Verde, más cerca, y la Laguna Azul al fondo. Vista desde el Cerrado das Freiras.

Por poco no estamos en la parroquia más occidental de Europa. Este título le correspondería a la de São José en la freguesía de Fajã Grande, en la azoriana Isla de Flores  —si aceptamos antes, claro está, que esta isla es Europa a pesar de asentarse sobre la placa americana—. Pero donde sí estamos ahora es en la parroquia más occidental de la Isla de San Miguel, es decir, a medio camino desde el Finis Terrae del viejo continente a las costas de Terranova. Exactamente ante la iglesia de San Nicolás, erigida el siglo XIX en una hoya volcánica especialmente hermosa que ostenta el populoso nombre de Sete Cidades. Aunque ciudades propiamente dichas aquí no hay ninguna; y gente, poca. El nombre le viene de la legendaria Isla de las Siete Ciudades, nunca encontrada pero viva en la literatura y las ensoñaciones de cartógrafos, marineros y exploradores del Atlántico, y contada a lo largo de los siglos con infinitas variantes.


Cualquier visita a estas islas, con el mar omnipresente y la dureza de las condiciones geográficas, pone sin remedio en nuestra imaginación el mundo de las ballenas y de los balleneros. Entre los hombres y mujeres que se congregaban este Jueves Santo en la iglesia de San Nicolás, pocos debía haber que no tuvieran un familiar que hubiera vivido de la caza de ballenas y cachalotes. Seguramente también la mayoría habrán tenido familiares que emigraron a América. Las dos cosas solían ir unidas, y llamaban «dar el salto» a subirse de noche, clandestinamente, a un ballenero norteamericano para tener trabajo y, sobre todo, por evitar el reclutamiento obligatorio para el servicio militar. Ayudados por la oscuridad, cuando sabían que algún barco ballenero americano estaba cerca, los hombres que deseaban una vida nueva encendían una hoguera en las rocas de la costa y a esta señal el capitán del barco botaba una chalupa para enrolarlos. Hasta en Moby Dick se recoge la presencia de balleneros azorianos (o, como se conocían en Nantucket y New Bedford, hombres de las Western Islands).


José Pecheco, Luís Silva: Canção de despedida. Del album Chants des baleiniers portugais de Faial, Açores (Canciones de los balleneros portuguese de Faial, Azores, 1958)

Fue a partir de 1756, al avistarse la primera embarcación ballenera de Nueva Inglaterra rondando las Azores, cuando la caza se hizo presente en las islas. En 1880, un tercio de los 3.896 balleneros de la flota de New Bedford eran azorianos. También los propios isleños fueron desde entonces desarrollando una flota y una industria local. Relativamente débil, casi artesanal, porque nunca llegó allí capital suficiente como para competir con las embarcaciones de alta mar americanas. Solo durante unos pocos años, a partir de 1951, la caza de ballenas alcanzó un nivel industrial significativo (751 cachalotes y 16.000 barriles de aceite en ese mismo año, por ejemplo) pero fue muy efímero: en 1957, con la erupción destructora del Vulcão dos Capelinhos y la subsiguiente emigración masiva, empezó un rápido declive hasta el cese total el 21 de agosto de 1987. Ese día, un grupo de amigos cazó el último cachalote, un leviatán de 15 metros descuartizado en la Isla de Pico. Hablaremos de ello en una próxima entrada. Quedan ya muy pocos viejos balleneros, normalmente hombres de escasas palabras, testimonios de una forma de vida que, como tantas otras, es imposible que vuelva.

Noruz with kings

Nou Ruz, New Light, the spring equinox, the twenty-first of March, or the first day of the month of Farvardin archangel, New Year’s Day in the Persian calendar. For weeks before it, three kings, singers dressed as Zoroastrian priests or painted as black men go about the bazaars, and wish good luck with New Year’s songs to the merchants and to everyone who rewards it with a few coins. They also brought good luck to me, because although the camera was not set to autofocus, nevertheless the gloom does not destroy the video, but rather makes it mystical. Near the middle, when they get closer, the picture will be sharper, and as they move away, the view gets gradually blurred, as if they were absorbed in the vibrant lights of the bazaar.


Two thousand five hundred years ago on this morning, King Darius and his descendants, surrounded by their nobility and priests, stood in the eastern gate of the Apadana, the royal reception hall of Persepolis, to greet the first ray of the rising sun, and then receive the envoys of the twenty-one provinces. The envoys are still lined up, carved in stone, on the eastern stairway, where they walked up, and on the northern stairway, where they left the royal hall. We go up to the palace at the best time, at five in the afternoon, to see, how the sunset paints them, how it calls them to life for an hour, every day, since two thousand five hundred years.

The gift-bearing of Persepolis became so emblematic in Persian culture, that even Marcell Mauss’ classical anthropological work, The Gift is illustrated by a Persepolis envoy in the Persian translation.


Just like the visit paid to the king on this day. There is no king in Persepolis now, since Alexander the Great and his chief commanders set fire to Xerxes’ palace on that drunken night. On this day, the people of Iran proceeds to the tomb of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the country. A colorful crowd is waving around the simple and majestic tomb that emerges alone in the plain of Pasargade. Medes from Hamadan, Kurds and Bakhtiari nomads from the Zagros mountains, Azeris and Khuzestanis, Armenians and Baludzhis, taking photos of each other and with each other, marveling at each other and at the greatness of the Persian empire. They also receive with self-evidence and joy the envoys of Europe, the heirs of Athens, who, after so many centuries, have finally come to a better understanding, and came to pay their tribute to the great king of Persia.

The Three Kings

Who are these three riders going uphill on the Romanesque bronze door of the cathedral of Pisa? Of course, the Three Kings, we say self-evidently, although, if you think about it more, no attribute proves it: no star and no manger. In our culture, the image of three riders has become an obvious visual topos over the centuries, and it evokes the Three Kings even when it comes to something completely different.

Originally, the three figures had neither horses nor crowns. They came to Bethlehem in simple clothes, on foot, carrying by hand their gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. This is how we see them in their earliest portrayal, in the Greek Room of the Priscilla Catacomb in Rome, and for centuries afterwards.



A thousand years later, the legend of the Pisan gate, MAGIS (correctly Magi) refers to the humble beginnings. The Latin word, written in a curious local orthography, like in many other places of the bronze gate, refers to the second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel: “After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked: Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” (Mt 2:1-2)

The adoration of the Wise Men, with the inscription “Magi”, in Anglo-Saxon runes. From the 8th-century Franks Casket, London, British Museum

What the King James Version translates wise men, is μάγοι in the original Greek, and magi in the Vulgata: “magicians”. But already in Matthew’s time, the Greek word had two meaning. One was “magician”, like Simon the Magician or Sorcerer in the Acts of Apostles. The other, original meaning, however, was the Persian magūs, which referred to the Zoroastrian priesthood, and, more broadly, to Persian astronomers. The Zoroastrian Persians also had their own traditions of a Savior to be born, and the Gospel suggests – which the Syrian and Armenian apocryphals then expand in detail – that they also recognized it in Jesus. That is why the magi are depicted even in the 5th century in Persian clothes and distinctive Persian hats. It is a strange twist in the story, that, according to the tradition, the Persian army devastating the Holy Land during the Byzantine-Persian War spared the Church of Bethlehem, because on its gate three characteristic Persian magi brought gifts to the just-born Savior.

The three Persian magi on the 6th-century mosaic of San Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna

The three Pagan philosophers worshiping Jesus might have been an attractive model to the newly converted Roman Christians, since they could identify themselves with them. This is why they are so often represented on sarcophagi. And probably for the same reason they are accompanied, from the earliest times, by another motif, the ox and donkey above the manger. These two animals, an inseparable part of all Nativity pictures, are surprisingly never mentioned in the Gospels. In fact, they are only visual representations of the quotation from Isaiah: “The ox knows his master, the donkey his lord’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.” (Is 1:3) Therefore, they symbolize the same as the three Persian wise men: that Christians converted from paganism – like, for example, the one lying in this sarcophagus – are more devoted to the true God than the Jews.

The ox and donkey focusing on the manger, as a confession of faith on Stilicho’s sarcophagus (ca. 385) in Milan’s San Ambrogio Basilica

A 4th-century sarcophagus, above with the ox and donkey, and below with the three magi. Arles, Musée de l’Arles et de la Provence Antique

An Ethiopian icon

The Christian exegesis of te first centuries used similar Old Testament parallels to draw out with more detailed features the very sketchy figures of the three wise men of the Gospels. Thus, for example, the star they followed was not considered a true star, but a reference to the prophecy of the pagan prophet Balaam: “A star will come out of Jacob, a scepter will rise out of Israel.” (Num 24:17) So the wise men, and later the kings in the pictures, originally follow not a star, but an angel who leads them to the “Star of Jacob”, that is, Jesus, and who then warns them to go back by another way. How much ink could be saved by the amateur astronomers, if they considered this, instead of trying to reconstruct the wildest constellations and comets for the supposed birthday of Jesus?

Altar of Duke Ratchis, Cividale, 737

Stonemason Gislebertus: The dream of the three kings. Column head in the Cathedral of Autun, 1125-1135

The dream of the three kings in the Salzburg Missal (ca. 1478-1489, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 15708 I, fol. 63r)

In the same way, the wise men bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh became kings by virtue of that verse of the Psalm: “May the kings of Tarshish and of distant shores bring tribute to him, may the kings of Sheba and Seba present him gifts. May the gold of Sheba be given to him.” (Ps 72:10). In the great 14th-century Catalan Atlas – drawn by our old acquaintance, the Mallorcan Jewish cartographer Jefudà Cresques – the three kings even appear next to the name of Tarshish, revealing the source of the identification.


Prophecy is also read elsewhere about the gifts: “Herds of camels will cover your land, young camels from Midian and Ephah. And all from Sheba will come, bearing gold and incense, and proclaiming the praise of the Lord.” (Is 60:6). For this reason – and not for the sake of exoticism – camels are already included in the earliest representations with the three magi, whether on the sarcophagi, or in later paintings.

Adoration of the magi. Sarcophagus from Basilica Sant’Agnese in Rome. Vatican, Museo Pio Cristiano, Inv. 31459

Giotto: Adoration of the Kings. Padova, Scrovegni Chapel, ca. 1305

Bartolo di Fredi: Adoration of the Kings, 1385. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, originally perhaps in the Duomo of Siena. In the background, in the city of Jerusalem we can discover our old acquaintance, the typical domed church of the Holy Sepulchre

On the Pisan bronze gate, made in 1181, we also find the scene of the Nativity. Bonanno Pisano, the master of the gate, had the original solution – repeated five years later on the gate of the Cathedral of Monreale – of dividing each biblical scene into two adjacent tables of the gate. The two tables look at each other and respond to each other. Here, the scene of the Nativity and the adoration of the shepherds to the left is complemented by the table of the three kings coming from the right, at the bottom of which, as a footnote interpreting the Nativity, the small-print scene of the fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Paradise is also represented. This refers to the well-known parallel, that “Adam is the pattern of the One to come” (Rom 5:14), and that “Death from Eve, life from Mary” (St. Jerome, 22.)



The separation of the two scenes also corresponds to the separation of the two feasts, Christmas and Epiphany, which were celebrated by the first Christians on the same day. The reason for the separation is that the Latin and Greek churches calculated the birth of Christ in different days: the Latins on 25 December, while the Greeks on 6 January. Not because – as it has been suggested since the 18th century – the Roman Christians wanted to christianize the pagan feast of Sol Invictus, since this feast was only introduced by Emperor Aurelianus (270-275), precisely to repaganize the Christian feast of Christmas. But rather because the Latin and the Greek solar calendars converted the day of Christ’s death, 14 Nisan in the Jewish lunar calendar, to different days, and, according to the biblical tradition, the prophets died the same day they were conceived. Thus, the Roman calendar converted 14 Nisan to 25 March – which is still the celebration of the Annunciation –, so Jesus was born on 25 December, while the Greek calendar to 6 April, so He had to be born on 6 January. By the 4th century, the Greek world had already adopted the Roman calendar, and the Greek church also celebrates Christmas on 25 December (which today falls on our 7 January, due to the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars), but the tradition preserved the importance of 6 January. The three kings continue to arrive on this day, just as Jesus is baptized on this day thirty years later. And the two former dates of Christmas constitute a frame for the festive garland of the Twelve Days of Christmas.



The scene divided in two by Bonanno Pisano also symbolizes the unity of the two churches. In fact, the gate of the Latin cathedral displays a Nativity according to the Orthodox tradition. In the late 12th century, the last peak of Constantinople, Byzantine icons inspired Italian art, and the early Renaissance will also germinate from them in the hands of Giotto and Duccio. The model used by Bonanno Pisano can be illustrated with the Nativity icon of the Church of the Dormition of Mary in Berat:


The 16th-century icon, written by Nicola, son of Onufri, the greatest icon painter of Epirus, follows the rules of Orthodox iconography, and every part of it carries a theological reference. In the middle of the rocky landscape, the newborn Jesus lies in a cave, wrapped in swaddling clothes, just as He will lay in a cave, wrapped in a shroud, after His death on the cross. He is recognized as their Lord by the ox and the donkey. A star appears in the sky above the manger, its ray points to the Star of Jacob appearing on the earth. The three kings, representing the pagans, and the shepherds called by the angels, representing the Jews, are coming towards Him. Mary, lying in glorious light, looks to the lower left corner of the picture, where a little tree crops up, referring to the tree of Jesse, the descendance of Jesus: “A shot will come up from the stump of Jesse, from his roots a branch will bear fruit.” (Is 11:1) In the lower region, two scenes from the apocryphal gospel of James, both of which are examples of faith overcoming doubt: Salome, the midwife helping at the birth of Jesus, who personally made sure of the virginity of Mary, and Joseph, tempted by Satan coming in the disguise of an old man, with the question: if the conception of Jesus was divine, why did He come to the world in an earthly way?

Each scene in the two icons are as per specification. They do not primarily narrate past events, but rather visualize verses of the Old Testament, which formulate the theological truth of the Nativity. The figures are needed to make visible, as in a mirror, the real significance of this event. The icon is not a representation in the Western sense, but a window onto the transcendence.

The only real figures, depicted for themselves on both icons, are the lambs, which are wandering free from all iconographic constraints in the transcendent space of the icon. They do not care about the biggest event in world history happening just around them, but they go on grazing, studying the grass, doing their business, like the skating kids in Brueghel’s pictures. They offer an excuse for the painter to use them as decorative motifs, or to happily play with them, like the medieval manuscript painters with the little figures of monsters in the margins. But if we think about Rilke’s Eight ecloge, we can also attach significance to them. They are the animal which does not need visual mediation, because they already see face to face, and by penetrating into the transcendent space of the picture, and freely wandering in it, they also invite us, the viewers, like the children’s faces looking out from the lower corners of the Renaissance paintings.

Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene… Frei von Tod. Ihn sehen wir allein; das freie Tier hat seinen Untergang stets hinter sich und vor sich Gott, und wenn es geht, so gehts in Ewigkeit, so wie die Brunnen gehen.

With all its eyes the animal world beholds the Open. … Free from death. Only we see death; the free animal has its demise perpetually behind it, and before it always God, and when it moves, it moves into eternity, the way brooks and running springs move.

New Year’s blessing

The Maya man, with a candle in his hand, steps out in the darkness of the night, in the terrible no man’s land between the old year that has gone and the new one that has not yet come. With a copal incense held high, he blesses the four directions of the world in the name of Jesus Christ, asking for good harvest and for protection from all evil to his whole family and their animals. Two dozen men, women and children are standing in a circle. The invisible light source of the incense placed in the middle illuminates their faces from the inside of the scene, like that of the three kings on Nativity paintings. The chiaroscuro of the candles held before them evoke the figures of Caravaggio, La Tour and Rembrandt in the Guatemalan night.


The name of the Israeli documentary film maker Eti Peleg is not unknown to the readers of Río Wang. A year ago we wrote about her film made on the “golden temples”, the monumental syangogues of fin-de-siècle Hungary, and many of you have also taken part at the premiere of her two other Hungarian films, on the onetime Jewish winemakers of Tokaj, and on the history of the song The rooster is crowing. Now she gives us a New Year’s gift, a scene of her Guatemala film in preparation, the New Year’s blessing.

“Exactly a year ago today, I was in Tzalamtun, Guatemala.
It wasn’t the first time I was there. I was among friends.

I didn’t even have to ask. Sebastián beckoned me aside and said, would I agree to film the Ceremony. I was honored and touched. He trusts me.
María Luisa took us to the market to buy the copal, the candles and the plentiful of food for the new year’s feast.
As the ladies prepared dinner in the kitchen, I was wondering what ceremony I am going to witness: a Quechi Maya or a Catholic one?


What a great new year’s present for me!
This film is a token of my affection and respect to Sebastián and Luisa Tiul and their wonderful family.”