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In the area around Arles, between the arms of the Rhone at its mouth on the
Mediterranean, at the heart of the swamps of the Camargue, where rice grows,
where bulls and horses wander, in a primeval landscape, the small town of
Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer: The gypsies' Mecca. No one knows exactly when they
started making pilgrimages here in honor of Saint Sara. The gypsies
themselves can't remember a time when this pilgrimage did not take place.
Sacred earth for the Christian faith, the Camargue was, according to
historians, the first site of the Christianization of France, which then
proceeded north along the Rhone valley, converting the Gauls. According to
tradition, Mary (the sister of the Virgin) and Mary (mother of the apostles
John and James the Elder), escorted by the revived Lazarus, by his sister
Martha and by the sinner Mary Magdalen, thrown out of Judea by the Jews in
Jerusalem, landed on the shore around the years 40-45 of the Christian era.
Sara, an Egyptian woman, the repudiated spouse of Pontius Pilate, had,
according to certain accounts, accompanied them. The gypsies claim that the
fugitives were welcomed on the shore by their ancestors with Saint Sara, the
"mother of their tribe," at their head. The corpses of the first two Maries
were exhumed and identified in 1448, and the remains of Sara later on. The
cult of this black Virgin began in the sixteenth century, and was associated
with the "procession to the sea" which re- united the three saints in 1935,
thanks to the intervention of the Marquis Folco de Baroncelli, an aristocrat
of Florentine origin who was interested in reviving local traditions (having
become himself, in 1900) a breeder of bulls and horses).
Each year, it's the next-to-last Sunday in October that one celebrates Mary
the sister of the Virgin, and May 24th and 25th Sara and Mary the mother of
the Apostles. The gypsies take the statue of their saint from the crypt in
the church, and transport it to the sea, in which they enter, to commemorate
the welcoming on the beach almost two thousand years ago. Whether legendary
or historical, this tradition has taken on a reality over the centuries in a
fertile environment. A kind of swamp with its cowboys, its herds of bulls and
cows, its immenses stretches of unpopulated land, inhabited by pink
flamingos, egrets, and ducks, the Camargue drives crazy those who love it. Is
it the wind, the ocean air that scatters the clouds and chills the bones, or
the mosquitos?
The gypsies have little by little rooted their magic in a country where those
who tolerate them the least perhaps resemble them the most: tormented by the
preservation of their liberty, jealously guarding their secrets, the people
of the Camargue go through life like a mirage. People from the sky who mix
with the sea and the seamps, people with white horses who gallop towards the
moon.
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