Patron saint festival
Feast of the Santissimo Crocifisso
📅 Every year, on 14 September
On 14 September Monteiasi celebrates the Santissimo Crocifisso; the town's folk heritage is kept in its Ethnographic Museum.
Nobody knows anything for certain about the name: some say monos tiasos, «sacred area», because fragments of statuettes of Dionysus have come out of the fields; or that tiasi were the wild dances the farmers did for Bacchus, which later became the taranta; or mons Blasi, the mount of Saint Blaise; or inter montes, among the hills, because the village sits between them.
The village, though, was made by Albanians. Between 1461 and 1470 Skanderbeg sent five thousand armed men to help the king of Aragon, and in thanks the king let them settle in the ruined hamlets of the principality of Taranto; in the sixteenth century a second wave arrived. They were Christians of the Greek rite, and when Taranto forbade that rite they had to emigrate again. What is left is the Foc'ra, the March bonfire for Saint Joseph.
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