Ovodda

At Ovodda carnival is celebrated on Ash Wednesday, Me^uris de Lèssia, that is on the day when carnival is supposed to be already over. The chief character is Don Conte, a man-shaped puppet, sometimes made hermaphrodite, dressed in a wide coloured tunic: during the night he undergoes a trial and is then burned. Even the name of that day carries a sound with it: the mark in the middle of Me^uris stands for the glottal stop, which is one of the features of the speech of this village — a particular form of the Nuorese of the Barbagia di Ollolai, used in nine villages and studied in the last century by two German scholars, Max Leopold Wagner and Heinz Jürgen Wolf.

Part of this territory belonged to another village, Oleri, which stood between Ovodda and Gavoi where the country church of San Pietro is today. In the first half of the fifteenth century the plague took it, and the survivors moved to Ovodda. A document records what happened next: in 1473, before the marquis of Oristano, the villages of Ovodda and Gavoi divided between them the territory of the now depopulated place — and present at the division was donnu Andria Mele, one of the last people who had lived there. Much later the valley was remade for water: the dam of Cucchinadorza was built between 1958 and 1960, and between 1972 and 1978 they hollowed out Monte Pitzuri and put inside it the largest hydroelectric station in Sardinia, three reversible units connected to the lake above by a pumping conduit that uses a drop of about three hundred metres. Above the lake there still stands the village Enel built for the men who ran it, with its little church among the pines.