Easter at Bova and the procession with the “Pupazze”.

At Bova every year on the Palm Sunday before Easter an ancient rite is celebrated.

The local people gather in workshops to build together typical sculptures, made with olive leaves and reeds with the shapes of women and they are decorated with the wild flowers and the first fruits. They are the “Pupazze” (puppets) or “the Palms of Bova“.

Everyone, men, women and children, weave olive leaves with great skill and patience around a cane axis. Once the structure is finished, the Pupazze are adorned with flowers, fruits, ribbons and laces. After the blessing, the palms are carried around the streets of the village and disassembled. The “steddi” (ie the parts which compose them) are given to people among the historic centre who keep them on a tree or in the house.

There are several opinions about the origins of this rite. For someone this tradition has roots even during the prehistoric times, when the populations evoked Mana (Greek name for the Mother Earth) with propitiatory rites for their crops and for the fertility of the lands.

For someone else it dates back to the myth of Persephone, whose traces are often found in local history and archeology, while other ones say which is an ancient Byzantine tradition of the Lent. Anyway it is an ancestral rite which the faithful renew every year, carrying in procession to the Sanctuary of San Leo (the patron of the village) the “Pupazze”, that is human-sized anthropomorphic statues with the figure of a woman.

Usually in Calabria, as in other regions of Italy, the abandoned villages revive during the holiday periods or in August when their people return there in search of memory or even to mitigate their sense of guilt for left their originary place. And these celebrations in Calabria tell of this comings and goings between the old and the new places.

 A further step is being taken in Bova, which is changing the face of a town and its surroundings and which is projected towards the future, through traditional events, such as Palm Sunday, which help to regain the historical and cultural identity of their own. But they are also restoring the built-up area in order to dissuade people from abandoning the village and help them to invest into new small tourist businesses and more.

Alessandra Ghibaudi – Bova

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