Erchie

On the coat of arms of Erchie there are two things that do not usually go together: a basin with eyes in it, which is the attribute of Saint Lucy, and the figure of Hercules. Hercules has to do with the name: it is held that there was a place of worship dedicated to him here, hence Hercolanum, and in the first century after Christ the place appears as Hercle, which in time became Herchie and finally Erchie. Saint Lucy, on the other hand, has to do with a story of relics. Around the tenth century some Basilian monks had settled in a Messapian cave of the territory, the one called dell'Annunziata, and had made an altar in it; legend has it that the Byzantine general Maniakes, who had taken the body of the saint from Syracuse to bring it to his empress, stopped in a cave of this area, and that the monks, after venerating the remains, were given a bone of the martyr. From that the cult of Saint Lucy began here.

What followed is even more concrete. The chapel was abandoned for centuries, until in the sixteenth century a cowherd found the little picture of the saint at the feet of a cow drinking at a spring in a hollow; the inhabitants carried the image back to the chapel and, so as not to lose the exact spot, built a temple over the spring, which today lies about nine metres below street level. That temple, with foundations too weak, collapsed in 1819; they did not give up, obtained the land from the duke and built the upper church, inaugurated on 25 April 1865. In the meantime the village had come close to disappearing: in 1377 the inhabitants were about twenty, more a rural farmstead than a settlement, and the repopulation began in the sixteenth century with the arrival of Albanians fleeing the Turks.