Returning to homeland
by Delfim Correlo
In dreams I have always return there, to that small town by the Atlantic Sea, in the far north of my country, where I spent my childhood.
Viana, a small town between the river, the mountain and the sea, with only about 90 thousand inhabitants, where people know each other and where every little joy or personal tragedy cannot be hidden.
However, every year it fills up with people during the month of August. People arrive, not only from various places in Portugal, but also from abroad, as tourism has had a great impact on the local economy for a long time; Galicia is nearby and the emigrants from last century still returns, bringing other generations with them...
On the 20th of August, the cult of its people to Nossa Senhora d'Agonia (Our Lady of Agony) is celebrated. The devotion to Mary, mother of Christ, who agonizes at the sight of her son's suffering, without being able to do anything - except have faith - emerged centuries ago, in the heart of a fishing community whose women turn in their suffering whenever their men and their children went out to sea…
Thus, every year, the fishing community shows its devotion to Mary, in a festival that the locals call Romaria, in which Catholic devotion merges with an ethnographic festival, full of color, music and dance to which the entire population joins… the folkloric groups perform throughout the city filling it with music and color; women wearing colorful traditional costumes and, those who can, show off their gold in parades around the city.
Fireworks are launched every night and, on the eve of the 20th, the fishermen draw colorful carpets with salt in the streets of the town's riverside, after all, the next day, their Saints walk these streets and go out to the sea, and then go up the river, in decorated boats, so that they bless its waters and the men who sail in them, allowing them to safety return…
And this year was a special year. It was the return of the festival after two years of absence due the pandemic. An absence that deprived people of celebrating their saints, their dances and songs; and which also deprived them of the money that tourists and emigrants leave in their passage. Because local services and commerce need them to come, as the land and sea no longer attract their people as they used to...among the fishermen a small community of Indonesians appears now, they too carry their litter with a saint, but that is another story.
Thus, this year the president, the minister, the bishop and the mayor joined the procession of the saints and their people, in a pilgrimage that seems to have broken attendance records.
The night falls and the festival descends to the city garden, by the river, next to my childhood home. This is where people gather to see the fireworks that are launched over the river at midnight.
I remember my mother just before she died, imagining herself back in Viana and the house where she was born, asking to take a last walk in that garden by the river.
“We always return to the place where we belong”, a friend once told me.
