Galego | English

Non fiction

Samaín: a festa das caliveras

By Rafael López Loureiro

About this book

In this book, Rafael López Loureiro brings back from oblivion the thousand-year old tradition of pumpkin carvings in Galicia. This traditional activity, which had not been studied in detail until now, relates the Galician culture with others in the Atlantic and in the ancient Celtic and Iberian area. This is the first anthropological study on this tradition and its Atlantic origin. The author describes, too, the evolution and consolidation of the festival of Samaín that was started in Cedeira more than a decade back. Finally, it includes a teaching unit to disseminate this tradition in all schools in Galicia.

Book fragment

In the area of Cedeira, when the autumn was already in full bloom, we used to gather maize and also melons that had been planted between the cereal and that were ready to eat. We used to take them to the barn or the stables where it was gathered in order to be used during slaughter time. That is why we used to call them pig’s melons, in order to mark the difference with the melons we used to eat, melons that came from outside, what we used to called “knife melons”. Many others were left on the ground to rot among the canes, and some were used for a completely different purpose. Instead of feeding the animals with them, we children who had taken part in the harvest were given one to do (many times with the help of our grandparents) one of the most thrilling activities in the childhood world of rural Galicia: a terrifying skull to scare all the cowards we could catch in some dark alley, on a crossing or in the middle of a dark bush.

The children in our street used to make the skull at home and helped one another, but this was not just a game, it was the production of a toy like many others; tastarabases, carriladas, andaravillas... etc.