The patroness of Lercara Friddi is Mary Most Holy of Constantinople, celebrated from 19 to 21 August. The scratched icon of the Madonna, bearing the date 1734, presumably came from a Lercara church that followed the Greek rite of the Lercari family: lost when that church fell into ruin, it was found outdoors near a nearby stream by eleven-year-old Oliva Baccarella in 1807. Popular tradition passes down that event as miraculous, and from it arose both the patronal feast and the church of Maria Santissima di Costantinopoli, built in 1840.
It was the discovery of sulphur that changed the town's fortunes, making it the only major mining centre in the province of Palermo for the extraction and processing of the mineral, and boosting its growth from 1828, with an unprecedented population boom: in 1893, the year the sulphur industry crisis began, Lercara's miners lamented severe delays in wages, and during the Sicilian Fasci the town paid a toll of eleven victims in the Christmas Day protest. Lercara stands almost at the foot of Colle Madore, a Sican archaeological site whose excavation season began in 1992.
