Furtei

On Palm Sunday the mayor of Furtei hands the parish priest a finely woven palm, a little over a metre tall, and the priest carries it in the procession in full view, as a sign of command and of blessing. That gesture repeats a treaty. In 1605 the two old villages of Furtei and Nuraxi made peace through the mediation of baron Sanjust, and the baron symbolically gave every family of the two villages a palm branch cut in his own garden. One of the two villages is no longer there: Nuraxi was destroyed, and what remains of it is its parish church, of the thirteenth century, in which Furtei still holds two feasts a year.

The calendar here is shared out among the people. The feast of Sant'Antonio is organised by the villagers called Antonio; Santa Rita is kept by the women who bear her name; the main feast, Santa Maria in September, belongs to is bagadius, the young men who are not married; and the feast of San Bernardino, whose statue was given at the beginning of the twentieth century by a family for a grace received, is still organised today by the daughter of the woman who gave it. In the church of the destroyed village, on the last Sunday of October, they call on San Narciso against the infestation of locusts, and sing the rosary in Campidanese Sardinian in alternate choirs, the men in the side aisle and the women in the central one. Then there is a date the village would rather not have: from 1997 to December 2008 a company controlled by a Canadian multinational held the concession here to mine gold, and when it went bankrupt and closed it left the ground polluted with cyanide, mercury and other heavy metals.