U Catenacciu di Corti

We went off to Corte for the four day Easter weekend. On Good Friday, Emily and Dan were on a nine hour death hike, so me and Lija wandered down to the river with a picnic and sat on the white granite boulders, round as speckled eggs, which were picturesque but uncomfortable. Her sandwich was made with unadvertised hazelnuts, which thankfully she noticed before taking a bite, as I don’t think the afternoon would have turned out well if anaphylactic shock, epipens, a scramble up a steep river bank and a mile’s walk back to the town had been involved. We read our books, sunbathed, wandered barefoot along the bank to a demolished bridge and wondered how much excrement ended up in the river, given the vicinity of the sewage farm.

That night we went to the town centre to see the Good Friday procession, on the recommendation of the cashier in Spar, who said that it was ‘très beau’. Like everything in Corsica it started late, with people milling around the statue of Pascal Paoli and Emily being greeted by lots of her pupils. At last we heard a metallic ringing sound, like Morris dancers’ bells, and hooded men approached singing a dirge. The first thing I saw was the black-clad figure of Mary carried on the shoulders of the penitents, and it took some time to realise that the bright ringing was a chain, dragging behind one of the men. It was sinister and comical all at once: the men and boys were in white robes and KKK style hoods, but several hoods were clearly made out of pillowcases and the eyeholes were sometimes reinforced with a double layer of fabric in the shape of the mask of Zorro. As the procession moved down through the town the hoods flopped like melting Mr Whippies, and many folded them back so that the white cotton stood out from their heads like the starched cornettes of the Daughters of Charity. Mary seemed to hobble like a crone, and Jesus in his glass sepulchre again reminded me of Snow White, this time with the wicked stepmother in attendance.

The men in their white robes and short black capes were from the Cunfraterna di San Teofalu, a 17th century Corsican Franciscan who was born in Corte. Corte is the most politicised city in Corsica, with slogans scrawled on every wall telling the French, Arabs, foreign developers and drug dealers to get out, and French place names are coated in black paint on road signs. It seems another interesting example of the convergence of Catholicism and Corsican nationalism, and how nationalist solidarity breathes new life into old traditions: Théophile was only canonised in 1930, when he became the patron saint of Corsica, and this confraternity was only founded in 1980. This catenacciu procession (it means the chained one, referring to the main penitent who carries the cross while dragging chains from his ankle) is not a new tradition - the more elaborate version in Sartène was apparently brought there by the Aragonese who founded the city in the 15th century - but I would guess that the nationalism adds another layer to the emotions of the participants.


We trailed behind the cross in a great crowd down the main road, and then up a narrow cobbled backstreet towards the church. The cobbles must be agony for the barefooted penitents. The way was lit by candles in red glass holders that flickered from behind the shutters of the tall, austere buildings, their flaking plaster facades speckled with bullet holes. Niches with plaster virgins were lit by candles from within, people leaned out of windows, smoking and watching, and a little old woman in a housecoat stood in her doorway letting the procession flow past. The rhythmic singing continued; I don’t know whether it was Latin or old Italian, or even Corsican, and all I could catch was ‘peccati, peccati’ at the end of the verse. Even without carrying a cross it felt like a long climb to the church, whose bell tower was lit gold. When we reached it, the priest went to a first floor window and preached to the crowd, with an altar boy holding the tinny, miniature amp beside him. In a niche above the church door, Mary stood, crowned and holding her child, and below her, Christ lay dead and Mary mourned.

If you would like to see pictures and a video of the procession from a previous year, this site has lots of information.