Since time immemorial man has celebrated the Lord with song, voice and the jubilation of musical instruments. Christianity connected Logos to the word and wove it into the deepest layers of collective memory. Wherever it has been, Christianity has formed an amalgam of the existing, traditional forms of devotion and the underlying musical idiom of the place.
Islanders are people with a particular mindset; one that holds on to the past while selecting the most authentic traits of their culture for the future. Hvar, like many islands on the pathways of great cultures, has undergone changes, as thrilling as they are amazing. From the prehistoric natives who left their traces for us in the many island caves, to the first civilized colonizers who came from the Ionian Sea five centuries before Christ, to the times of pirates, the Crusades and the Venetian Republic, from which we have the largest number of material traces. People carry with them their spiritual heritage wherever they go. So it was that the Parans from the Ionian Sea brought theirs with them. The Romans legitimized Hvar in prosaic terms, and then the Crusaders chose the jetty at Jelsa as the vantage point from which they would watch for the danger threatening from the East. Each of these groups brought what they held to be most precious: Christianity rooted in the authentic context of the Mediterranean. There are many traces in the registries of births and deaths that document the influence of the Cistercians in Jelsa. This allows us to follow the waxing and waning of the confraternities modeled on the charitable communities of the early Christians and formed around a theme: fishing, ecclesiastical, defense or some other. Recollection of the Brothers is still evoked through the trappings of religious processions, the mantles, and, most of all, through the customs that have survived from the time.
The most famous and the most moving of these customs is the procession on Good Thursday evening. It begins at 9:30 PM, based on an unwritten, para-liturgical rule, that is, to my knowledge, unique. There are evening processions of various types on that holy day, from Jerusalem, the Vatican and Portugal all the way to Switzerland, but all the others begin at 7:00 PM. None of these processions does precisely what the Hvar procession does: literally bearing the cross all night in a full circle, traversing all seven villages in the area around Jelsa, manifesting the true character and nature of the testament. The bearer of the cross follows Christ, takes up his cross, the physical, heavy cross, as heavy as our earthly sojourn in the vineyard of the Lord, and carries it all night until he returns, like the Sun, to where he began. The night, with the full Moon as the sole guide across the starry sky, is a spiritual and physical signpost for the faithful, and intimate proof that they are walking the Earth within the very Heavens.
Each of these six villages sings as it speaks, in a vocal idiom purely its own, following the vocalization of the dialectical speech of everyday life. So it has happened over the centuries that out of a single underlying choral theme from the September mass for Our Lady of Seven Sorrows have grown melodies, some holding close to the original theme, others remarkably distinct from the chant, or melisma, resembling those in the Eastern liturgy, and, there is reason to believe, much like what was sung by the chorus during Greek tragedies. Today’s speech is, after all, a form of “flattened” vocalization. People used to build languages in tune with their musical ear, and today we still distinguish one person from another by the way each of us modulates as we speak.
This recording is a faithful transmission of the remnants of a tradition which used to be central, the most vital on the Mediterranean. It wasn’t corrupted by the Roman or the Venetian liturgy. The people of Hvar have stayed faithful to the strictures of the Liber Usualis, but they have adapted it ‘to their liking’. By doing so, they have manifested the truth, long before Luther did, that faith is transmitted through the familiar Logos, to those for whom it is inscribed, from childhood, in their hearts.
There are many legends interwoven around this moving and deeply mysterious collective act, especially on the origins of the procession. From stories of a cross that “wept” in Vrbosko, to fending off the plague, tales of cross bearers who went barefoot or on their knees, cross bearers who despite the bans imposed by the Italian occupation during World War II bore a small cross tucked under a jacket, alone in a gale, a symbol of that much larger cross, to insure that the continuity of the tradition would be unbroken, faithfully ministering to the dedication of their sheep with sixfold torment at the altar. No matter where the true roots of this human testament lie, it is the ultimate, sincere Christian expression for us to walk boldly along Christ’s path through the suffering of the Mother of God who bears the torment of her innocent and divine Son, just as he promised, “I am with you to the end of the World.” For he alone saw our suffering.
That same warmth pervades the singing through the church year, and with it comes the courage to find natural voice for the melodies, a breathing that shapes both speech and song, easing doubt about man’s mission on Earth, and giving the strength we need to fulfill that mission with calm soul and emboldened heart.
Đurđa Otržan, musicologist
Editor, Classical Music Program, Croatian Radio
from Vrisnik