Around harvest

On Sunday morning system administrator and olive planter Porrozillo walked out to the edge of Úbeda, and contemplated with satisfaction his plantation spreading in the Andalusian mar de olivos or sea of olives which promised an abundant harvest. He also took a photo and he sent it to our forum of El País readers.

In the spring we have already written about Úbeda – in whose Carmelitan monastery Saint John of the Cross died in 1591 – a propos of their never ending fiestas, especially of the celebrations of the Holy Week. This photo was made from the promenade named for the great son of the town, the prominent contemporary author Antonio Muñoz Molina, that is from somewhere here. If you cannot sleep, count the olive trees on the map.

On the plantations of Csömör the harvest is already over.

Mani nella salsa

View of Istanbul from the window of Orhan Pamuk (El País)

In this year Turkey is the special guest of the Frankfurt Book Fair, and on this occasion Babelia, the literary supplement of El País has asked Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk to present his own Turkish library.

Con poco más de veinte años no compraba los libros como un coleccionista, sino como alguien inquieto que quisiera comprender lo antes posible, leyéndolo todo, el sentido del mundo: el motivo de la casa en los cuentos populares de Gümüshane; la trastienda de la rebelión de Ethem el circasiano contra Atatürk; un listado de asesinatos políticos en la época constitucional; la historia de la cacatúa de Abdülhamit, comprada por el embajador en Londres por encargo del sultán y enviada desde Inglaterra a Turquía; ejemplos de cartas de amor para tímidos; la historia de la introducción de las tejas de Marsella en Turquía; las memorías políticas del médico que fundó el primer hospital para tuberculosos; una Historia del Arte Occidental de ciento cincuenta páginas escrita en los años treinta; los apuntes de clase del comisario que enseñaba a los estudiantes de la escuela de policía las maneras de combatir a los pequeños delincuentes callejeros como carteristas, timadores y descuideros; los seis tomos de memorias de un antiguo presidente de la república, llenos de documentos; la influencia en la pequeña empresa moderna de la ética de los gremios otomanos; la historia, los secretos y la genealogía de los jeques de la cofradía de los cerrahi; las memorias del París de los años treinta de un pintor olvidado por todos; las intrigas de los comerciantes para elevar el preciod de las avellanas; las quinientas páginas de duras críticas de un movimiento marxista turco prosoviético a otro movimiento prochino y proalbanés; el cambio de la ciudad de Eregli tras la apertura de las fábricas de hierro y acero; el libro para niños titulado Cien turcos famosos, la historia del incendio de Aksaray; una selección de columnas de entreguerras de un periodista totalmente olvidado hacía treinta años; la historia bimilenaria comprimida en doscientas páginas de una pequeña ciudad de la Anatolia Central que no era capaz de localizar en el mapa de un primer vistazo; la afirmación de un maestro jubilado que pretendía, a pesar de no saber inglés, haber resuelto el misterio de quién era el asesino de Kennedy sólo leyendo la prensa turca.

Pamuk offers an unexpected explication for this eclectic interest. Although he was born in an upper middle class family, and both his father and grandfather had a considerable library – about which he writes with great affection in his Istanbul –, but this library, as he says, was rather a “museum” to him. In fact, in 1928 the Arabic alphabet was officially replaced with the Latin one, and for the generations educated after this date the complete previous literary production has become unaccessible. Even if the texts of the earlier authors were being gradually published in Romanized version, but in the lack of continuity the elevated and sophisticated language of the Ottoman literature had also become obsolete, so much that – at least in the case of more ancient authors – even a modern Turkish “translation” had to be added to the Romanized transcription of the original Osmanli text. The established canon has thus lost its validity, and Pamuk, just like his contemporaries, had to create a new one for himself out of whatever he found. Hence the impatience, the neglect of the hierarchies of genres, the joy of discovery and the liberty of heterogenity.

It is not accidental that the personal canon of Pamuk includes several authors from Istanbul who around and after the turn of the century produced a similarly “gathering” oeuvre, from Reşat Ekrem Koçu, the author of the Istanbul Encyclopedia which was published in monthly instalments and remained unfinished, to the late 19th-century journalist Ahmet Rasim, who in his “letters”

a lo largo de medio siglo, escribió sin parar sobre todo lo que se refiriera a Estambul: de los diversos tipos de borrachos a los vendedores ambulantes de los suburbios; de los dueños de los colmados a los malabaristas callejeros; de los músicos a los pordioseros; de la belleza de los barrios del Bósforo a las tabernas; de las noticias cotidianas a las de la Bolas; de los parques, plazas y lugares de diversión a los mercados semanales; de las bellezas individuales de cada estación del año a las muchedumbres; de los juegos con bolas de nieve y trineos a la historia de la prensa; de los cotilleos a los menús de los restaurantes. (Orhan Pamuk: Estambul)

Sébah and Joaillier, photographers of the sultan: Café in Istanbul, end of the 19th century

Something similar to this is reported by Arthur Rimbaud in The alchemy of the word about the canon losing its force and about the elevation of the appreciation of the genres hitherto confined to the lowest levels of hierarchy:

I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable. What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints; old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the nave rhythms of country rimes. (Translation by Paul Schmidt)

And something similar comes to my memory as well if I recall how in my teenager age the various canons of the books at home, of the school readings and of the official book publishing of the last years of Communism became empty for me – that is, how I gradually lost my interest in what “one must read” –, and how I began to track down second-hand book shops, flea markets, book sellouts, Transylvanian, Slovakian and foreign language bookshops and then ancient libraries, in order to fish out of the debris and disorder, or at least of orders unknown to me, works that were important only to me, that I discovered for myself.

All that is over. Today, I know how to celebrate beauty. – finishes Rimbaud his relation. But he is only half right. Of course one gradually composes his own canon and also understands the values or at least the points of view of the other canons as well. But the joy and freedom of treasure-hunting, of exploring the obscurity, of discovering and personalizing the small and the forgotten will never be over if one has once felt it.

Orhan Pamuk: Estambul, cover photo of the Spanish edition

Andalusian Holy Week

On the El País web forum in which I also participate, this is already the second year that web guru and olive planter porrozillo has published the photos of the Holy Week processions in Úbeda. This year he only sent a short video, but it reminded me to publish here the photos of the previous year to demonstrate that there are places where they still do it properly.

The Andalusian Úbeda, on Unesco’s World Heritage list, is famous for its olive plantations and its Holy Week processions. These latter have been organized by the city’s eighteen religious confraternities active since the Middle Ages. The ceremonies start already at the beginning of Lent with posters, advertisements and publications, daily festive Stations of the Cross, pageants presenting the holy images and statues with the partecipation of thousands of persons, as well as public rehearsals of the bands on the main square. The common blog of the confraternities publishes illustrated daily reports on all that. By the way, the series of Lenten and Holy Week feasts is only the biggest among the ten similarly generous feasts organized throughout the year by the confraternities, and in addition there are also yearly four flamenco and old music festivals in the city. After all, one has to fill out with something the dead time between the pruning of the olives and the harvest.

The Holy Week ceremonies start on Palm Sunday with the entrance of Christ in Jerusalem. This is organized by the Borriquillo (Ass’s colt) confraternity from eleven in the morning until the fireworks of nine in the evening.


On Monday the confraternity of Our Lady brings forward with all solemnity the statue of the Virgin from the church of Santa María de los Reales Alcázares, so that she would also start her all week long way to the Golgota, accompanying the image of Jesus in every other procession.


On Tuesday night from ten o’clock celebrations of Tenebrae, and then a night procession with the Cross throughout all the city.


The Wednesday procession on the vigil of the Last Supper was washed out by a downpour, but the commemoration was nevertheless celebrated.



On Thursday morning, prayer on the Mount of Olives.


Then a series of processions follow throughout all the day, each celebrated by a different confraternity: that of the Column, of the Flagellation, and, already at the dawn of Friday, the Sentence.






On Friday, at sunrise starts the procession of the Road to the Calvary, organized by the Jesus Nazareno confraternity of the guild of the oil pressers since the 1400s. The commemoration of each of the three Falls under the Cross are taken over from them by other processions. At three o’clock in the afternoon starts the procession of the Death on the Cross.





After the procession of the Descent from the Cross, at seven o’clock in the evening starts that of the Vigil or of the Pietà. This is the largest one among all, organized with the participation of all confraternities, twenty processions with forty-nine images all in all.





Finally, the series of Holy Week commemorations is closed on Sunday morning with the High Mass and the procession of the Resurrection.


If you are curious of videos and more photos, have a look at the blog of the Úbeda confraternities, where you can also read the reportages on the Holy Week of this year.

¡Viva España!

This is how the proposed new text of the Spanish hymn begins, that was just rejected by the Spanish Olympic Committee when I arrived to Spain. Throughout its ephemeral life this text has caused much tempest that has even reached as far as to Hungary. Simultaneously, the leaders of the right-wing party decided not to enter in the approaching elections their last trustworthy face, the Mayor of Madrid Gallardón, but to nominate instead Manuel Pizarro, a businessman of a controversial past on the second place of their list. The web forum of readers of El País of which I also have the honor of being a member has immediately discovered, with a good nose, the subtle relationship between these changes and my travel to Spain. The East-European agent arrived to Spain for the subversion of the Right, and he has already hitched up to the job.


My first step is to look for an internet spot to receive my instructions. The members of the readers’ forum had promised me to compose a list of the bars I should unconditionally visit in Madrid in those few days while working in the National Library. I get in touch with them in the quarter of Carabanchel, in an Ecuadorian internet locutorio that has established an exemplary internationalist brotherhood with the proletariat of a large number of the countries of the world. Half of the room is occupied by a Columbian food store in which the wares are not arranged by sort, but by countries of origin. They line up on the shelves under handwritten shelf-marks like in a good library, in order the guest worker should not browse for long: Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Poland, Romania... The countries known by me are unequivocally represented by wares in lack of which the guest workers of that country are orphan kids: for example mineral water of Borsec and poteen of Braşov for the Romanian immigrants who are just illegally dismantling and selling as Francoist souvenir the iron grids of the once notorious, today abandoned prison of Carabanchel, thirty euros a piece of an ell. “Does it really sell?” I ask of the little round Columbian seller, with a hint to the water of Borsec. “Like hot cakes!” he answers with a large smile.


The first program item is the visit of the Rastro scheduled to realize on Sunday morning. However, this flea market spreading over the steep southern streets of Madrid has lost much of its glamor, today it is rather a tourist spot and a market of cheap Chinese commodities. Nevertheless, the seafood bars coming in quick succession on the Ribera de Curtidores offer a generous compensation to the observer who arrives from a country without sea.


In the evening we still go with Ana to the Bukowski Club run by their friend, the Argentinian writer Carlos Salem, but with this the thread is altogether broken. I will not get to the Cafe Comercial at the Bilbao metro station, neither to the antiquarian shop on Moyano, not even to the Pizzeria “El Trebol” at the Sol station, where I should greet Gerardo and Arturo in the name of Ariel. I come down with flu, and lay with fever throughout the two days I had dedicated for working in the library and exploring the city. Mission incomplete. It is a luck that with my last forces I had been able to drag myself to the National Library where I get to know that it has unexpectedly closed, because an Argentinian diplomat had been stealing books for several months and now as he’s got pinched they make inventory. Better so, at least I am not annoyed that much by the idleness forced upon me.

Ana and José, our friends whom we had known in Iran attend me with devotion. They cook tea for me, look for pills, and give me Orsón, the big plush St. Bernard dog as a bed-warmer. I ask them to bring me some Borsec mineral water from the Columbian shop, as this is also used as a medicine in the Carpathian Székely land from where it comes. With the poteen of Braşov I do not dare to make experiments.

On Wednesday morning I am roaming still dizzy with illness on Terminal 4 of the Madrid airport, looking for a plug for my notebook. On Spanish airports I always find a place where I can work some hours until departure. Here, however, I have no success with this either. In the cafés, the salad bars, and even in the always reliable McDonalds envious hands smoothed out the bottoms of the columns and the walls alongside the chairs.

I sit down at least for a coffee, with a book in the hand. In the meantime it is announced that the plane to Mallorca will leave with a delay of an hour. I am just reading about how hopelessly Kapuściński tries to find a plane in the middle of the revolution in Kongo, when someone next to me begins to hum a tune. I jerk up my head. A young woman is softly singing to herself at the next table above her coffee, still half sleeping, persistently. I cannot grasp the melody, the rhythm is also free. It sounds like flamenco, and then perhaps like a ballad. The throaty alto voice fills the café and makes it homely. Bienvenido a España.