Santa Gemma – Demetra – Kerres – Goriano Sicoli (AQ)

Santa Gemma – Demetra – Kerres – Goriano Sicoli (AQ)
Saint Gemma (ph. P. Di Giannantonio)

di Paola Di Giannantonio

Premise

Demeter forever was the title that, years ago, I gave to my study on the popular festival of my country. A town enclosed in the heart of the Abruzzo Apennines: Goriano Sicoli. A name that recalls Sicily, a singular name for being in the province of L'Aquila. A country that is not easily accessible but which, thanks to its secular isolation which lasted until the 60s of the last century, has preserved in its culture an ancient, fascinating, mysterious popular festival: the Feast of Santa Gemma. Unfortunately, due to Covid, the party was interrupted and it is for this reason that I will tell it using past tense verbs.

The inhabitants of my town have always been shepherds, farmers and craftsmen capable of producing almost everything they needed by themselves. I was lucky enough to be born and raised in a family of farmers-shepherds with an illiterate but delightfully wise grandmother-matriarch, born in 1890. It took many years to understand the importance and to value the knowledge learned from her and from hers fellow-sistersas friends used to call each other. It was that agro-pastoral oral culture learned in the family and in the village that aroused my curiosity and prompted me to seriously reflect on that complicated and only apparently disorganized popular cultural heritage, misunderstood and despised by conventional culture. And yet, to decode that enigmatic heritage, undervalued by conventional written culture, it was necessary to know that conventional and written culture in depth.
A respectable school education would not have been enough to orient me in this field so far in time, nor would I have been able to rediscover the threads with my culture of origin if I had not encountered the thought of two enlightened and illuminating scholars, only apparently distant between them, Antonio Gramsci[1] and Marjia Gimbutas[2].

Traces of an agricultural and matriarchal society in the feast of S. Gemma

The feast of Santa Gemma in Goriano Sicoli was the most important feast of all and marked the time of the seasons throughout the year, so that the working time of the entire community coincided with sacred time. What conferred sacredness on the toil of human beings and on the time spent working in the fields was the bond of all the people with the patron saint of the town as part of the fruits that the earth produced in each season was donated to celebrate the 3 festivals of the year in his honor: the party of Saint Gemma Grande of 11-12 and 13 May and the 2 little Santa Gemma parties of 8 September and 27 March.
At the basis of the organization of the three parties were the collected of the products of the earth. Each family gave the Saint a part of the harvest of each season of the year. It started in June with the milk collection: each family donated the milk obtained in one day from the sheep they owned. Cheese would be made of it to be eaten and used to season meals on the days of the three feasts. The patches of dried cheese that would have been useful for those days were kept in the middle of the grain inside the sacks; and the more was sold to raise money for the expenses of the party: shootings, bands and more. This happened for all the products in the collections. In addition to the concrete need to collect the proceeds for managing the expenses of the holidays, the offerings of the fruit were symbolic both of thanksgiving to the land that had produced them and, at the same time, they were a good omen for the next season's harvest. The offer of milk was also a symbol of thanksgiving to the land for the wild herbs of the pastures it had given birth to feed the flocks.
It followed, in July, the grain harvest which took place in the country's threshing floor: the party attorney he passed with a sack to each head of the family who he offered in proportion to his harvest.

Egg offerings in Santa Gemma (ph. P. Di Giannantonio)

On the first Tuesday after August XNUMXth the new procurator came out of the house in S. Gemma with an assistant for the egg collection which would be used for the upcoming 8/XNUMX party. S. Gemma's lunches, biscuits and donuts will be prepared with eggs. There corn harvest took place in August-September.
Always in the same way, in late autumn, in the cellars passed the attorney a collect the wort coming from the different grapes, white, black and red of each farmer's vineyard.

All products were delivered to house of Santa Gemma, A kind of ziggurat of Middle Eastern memory, with different environments, located in the historic center of the town. During the winter, the light chores of sorting, cleaning, drying and preserving the products took place in this house. The works were carried out by the less well-off and older people of the town, volunteer men and women who on working days had the opportunity to eat and warm up in the house.

House of Santa Gemma (ph. P. Di Giannantonio)

La oil collection it was the last one of the year and took place in the towns of the Peligna Valley where olives were grown because there weren't any in Goriano Sicoli due to the altitude of the town.

Always, in the collections, the prosecutor of the party, also called celebrate it, was accompanied by second prosecutor that he would manage, got the party the following year and this apprenticeship would have allowed him an optimal direction of the party. This experience also applied to his wife, la second prosecutor. Men and women had distinct roles, established by tradition and always rigorously respected. As far as I remember males and females were treated equally and both considered sacred.

La egg collection it was a ritual itself. Around the country two women went out, the prosecutor and the second; one carried the basket on her head covered with a beautiful colored scarf, the other had a small bell in her hand which she rang continuously to attract the attention of the women of the house, who would go out and put the egg in the basket or instead the offering in pennies they put inside the maidservant, a napkin tied at the corners. Santa Gemma can increase it was the formula pronounced by the prosecutor and the bidder replied: I can do it.

Offerings of Saint Gemma (ph. P. Di Giannantonio)

The wish of propitiation of abundance pronounced so solemnly by the women made me think that the earth was being prayed for the harvest and its gifts. The women were entrusted with the work of the house, the bread-making and the preparation of the ritual sweets, while the men took care of the work outside the house, the heavier country jobs more suited to their physique.

The Feast of Santa Gemma Grande.

From the numerous signals coming from the actions, from the gestures, from the rituals of this very complex festival and from its widespread organization, one cannot ignore considering it a socio-economic and sacral cross-section dating back to the first agricultural Neolithic, the era in which it was developed the cultivation of wheat and its transformation into flour and bread-making. In fact, the feast of S. Gemma of Goriano Sicoli is known as the Santa Gemma bread festival and the preparation of the bread is itself a further impressive, suggestive ritual[3] which was being prepared inside the house of the saint in a large kitchen. The votive bread it will be distributed to every family in the town, to pilgrims and strangers during the evocative procession on 11 May.

The bread ritual is the central part of the festival and must be considered a fragment of archaic ceremonies of the first Neolithic agricultural, community and matriarchal societies developed in the Fertile Crescent. In fact, the rite is centered on the participation of all the people who share the products of the earth as this votive bread is prepared, as already mentioned, with the flour coming from the grain offerings of the fields of every farmer in the town and the Its leavening was obtained by offering a little of the leaven that every mother of a family kept at home.

During the pandemic, the prosecutor asked all women residing in the country and outside the country for a photo to remember the Saint and this is the photo that the author forwarded in May 2020, the first year in which the party could not take place do, placing precious blankets on the balcony of his house and the loaf of bread with the image of the Saint leaning among the leaves of the tree in his garden (ph. P. Di Giannantonio)

The sense of community distinguishes all the numerous rites of the feast, but the rite of bread and that of the Santa Gemma wine. These two rites are interconnected because on feast days, out of devotion, the villagers went to the sacred house to eat a piece of that bread together and drink a glass of that wine: everyone ate everyone's bread and drank everyone's wine in a solemn moment of authentic communion. This occasion helped to extinguish personal conflicts and to strengthen the ties of identity and cohesion of the population.

The ancient ritual of May 11 takes place in the morning of the day before while in the afternoon it will take place Procession of baskets during which bread is distributed to all the families of the town in yet another symbolic ritual referring once again to thanksgiving to the earth for the bread which has guaranteed life in the current year and the propitiation of its fertility for the future seasonal cycle .

For all these reasons, the feast of Saint Gemma of Goriano Sicoli can be considered a social and organizational cross-section of a matriarchal society that has miraculously survived to this day. Its development methods, the gestures, the division of people's roles based on age, the places distinguished by function in the sacred house, the multiple symbolisms linked to the shape of the bread and the votive sweets prepared on the nights preceding the feast together with minor but complementary moments to the great ritual suggest a matriarchy defined by a consolidated agro-pastoral economy dating back to the first period of the Neolithic, whose origin can be traced back to the spread of agriculture in the central area of ​​our peninsula around the fifth millennium BC. as now recognized by historians[4].

Another image of the Saint during the pandemic (ph. P. Di Giannantonio)

Footnotes

[1] Antonio Gramsci - "Quaderni del Carcere - Literature and national life" - passages collected under the title of Observations on folklore – Einaudi – Turin 1950.

[2] Marija Gimbutas – The language of the goddess – Venice 2008.

[3] Paola Di Giannantonio – Demeter forever – M. Fuller edition – 2005.

[4] Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza – History and geography of human genes – Adelphi – Milan 2005.
Paul DiSacco – History course. Ancient history – Le Monnier – 2005.
Paola Di Giannantonio – The Oscan Table of Capracotta – Lightning Typography – Ripalimosani 2021.

Paola Di Giannantonio - 2022