There is a house in Żurrieq that is only rented out on condition that every year, the tenant must decorate the facade of the house for the feast of Our Lady of the Mount Carmel.
Meanwhile further north, an established notary in Valletta always starts to draft the promise of sale for a property with the name of the saint whose festa happens to fall on the day of the contract.
These are just two of the festa-related curiosities that feature in a new publication called The Maltese Village Festa – A Traditional Yearly Ritual, illustrated with some 600 photos taken over 13 years by Patrick J Fenech.
It is a photographic anthology of the yearly ritual of the Maltese village festa, with researched essays by Paul Sant Cassia, Carmel Cassar, Vicki Ann Cremona, the late Jeremy Boissevain, Raymond Saliba and Rev. Jesmond Manicaro, and a foreword by current Labour whip – but also feast enthusiast – Godfrey Farrugia.
The book includes Prof. Boissevain’s latest essay on Maltese festi, in which he discusses how festa partiti in Malta arose as part of the expansion of the feast’s activities.
Prof. Boissevain argues that the scale and elaboration of these celebrations increased because they express the desire of people “buffeted by waves of radical change and political divisiveness to celebrate playfully”, and so to re-establish their identity and reconnect with one another to achieve, momentarily, the peace of “communitas”.
If alienation was a characteristic of industrial society, post-industrial society appears to be characterised by more celebration and public feasts, he concludes.
Prof. Boissevain, who passed away last year, was a long-time observer of Maltese feasts and had authored Saints and Fireworks: Religion and Politics in Rural Malta in the 1960s.
Mr Fenech’s publication is in a way inspired by Prof. Boissevain’s idea of seeing a scholarly and photo documentary book about the village feast in order to bridge the divide between festa lovers and those who perhaps know very little about this part of our cultural heritage.
Over the years, Mr Fenech collected notes, photographic and written observations in a journal purely for his own personal interest, which became revitalised after he met Prof. Boissevain in the late 1980s at a private barbeque in Naxxar.
It was this providential encounter that opened up a plethora of ideas and spurred on a keen interest in Mr Fenech to present a body of work that should serve the short as well as the long-term visitor to our islands to understand why the nation goes ‘festa mad’ in summer.
A handful of pictures, newspapers cuttings and personal observations soon developed into a project that took nine years to complete.
