San Pedro Manrique (Soria), June (EFE) bare feet a carpet of fire, an ancient tradition that has captured the attention of four thousand people.
The inhabitants of this town nestled in the Tierras Altas region, one of the most unpopulated in the province, have renewed this ancestral festival declared of National Tourist Interest for another year, projected to the rest of the world, which began to be known well into the twentieth century.
intangible heritage
The City Council began the procedures a few years ago to get UNESCO to recognize these festivities as Intangible Heritage of Humanity, which since 2005 have carried the stamp of Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC) and since 2008 as a festivity of National Tourist Interest.
The ritual begins when the sun goes down, at which time a thousand kilos of oak firewood are burned in the amphitheater of the hermitage of the Virgen de la Peña, to prepare the path of embers through which the pasadores will travel at midnight.
While the oak wood is being consumed in flames, the public has been filling the amphitheater of the Virgen de la Peña hermitage to attend an ancestral celebration that runs to the west and that experts point out as an initiation ritual to achieve immortality through the purifying fire.
When midnight arrives, with the stands full of the public and the carpet of fire illuminating the scene, the Sampedrano passers have opened their ritual. After going around the tongue of fire three times, to the sound of music and barefoot, they have concentrated to face this challenge for another year and begin the passage of fire carrying the three mondidas.
children of the people
They say that only the children of the town spend the fire, not because outsiders are prevented from trying their luck, but because volunteers are never abundant and also, according to the general sentence of the neighborhood, “those from outside are burned.”
The burning embers, alone or with someone on their backs, have been crossed as they have been every year since ancient times, from generation to generation. Elena has carried her daughter for a year and a half.
In recent history, this feat (known as pyrobatics) has aroused the interest of curious scientists and parapsychologists, who have said about almost everything, from the fact that the secret lies in stomping hard so as not to leave oxygen and avoid combustion, to the fact that they contain the breathing, passing through concentration, faith, sweat, wine or air bubbles that come between the skin and the embers.
Fire and Mondidas
The entire ritual is presided over by the Móndidas, three young women chosen by lottery in May –once among the marriageable girls-, who are the protagonists of the acts of the festival of San Juan.
Dressed in a white dress and a strange basket on their heads with bread flowers and long sticks of flour and saffron (arbujuelo), they recall the tribute of the Hundred Maidens after the Muslim defeat in nearby Clavijo, during the Reconquest.
As tradition marks, the first three passers have carried the three móndidas on their backs (Alicia Fresno, Leire Martínez and Ana Pascual), and without interruption they have chained footprints in the mantle of oak wood ashes that reaches a temperature of 400 degrees.
With their pants rolled up, a man, a woman or a teenager have stepped determinedly on the embers, taking five to nine steps -usually seven-, in the face of the contained emotion of the spectators.
The origin of these festivities has been studied, among others, by the ethnographer Julio Caro Baroja, who witnessed the passage of fire in 1950, and the researcher Chesly Baity, a decade later. Both found similarities in the passage of fire with that of the Hirpi Sorani of Classical Italy and with the Indo-European peoples of South India. EFE