Holy Week

Holy Week is the week from Palm Sunday to Holy Saturday, the most solemn of the Christian year, in which the church commemorates day by day the final events of Christ's life, from the entry into Jerusalem through the Last Supper, betrayal, trial, crucifixion and burial, to the vigil of the resurrection. Its distinctive feature is that it follows the events in something like real time, assigning each to its day and hour.

This "historical" or stational liturgy has a traceable origin. In fourth-century Jerusalem, as the pilgrim Egeria records in detail, the church began to keep each event at the very place and on the very day and hour it was believed to have happened, processing to the Mount of Olives, to Golgotha, to the tomb; pilgrims carried the practice home, and the whole Christian world gradually adopted a week that re-enacts rather than merely recalls. The last three days, the Triduum of Maundy Thursday evening to Easter, form a single continuous liturgy in the Western reckoning. Across traditions the week is marked by stripped altars, silenced bells, extended Gospel readings and, in many countries, large public processions, making it the most visible week of the Christian calendar.

In parts of Spain and Latin America, Holy Week processions organised by lay religious brotherhoods, cofradias, have grown into major public spectacles and significant tourism draws in their own right, most famously in Seville, where dozens of brotherhoods parade elaborately dressed pasos, large sculptural floats bearing images of Christ and Mary, through the city streets over several days and nights, accompanied by penitents in the distinctive pointed hoods, nazarenos, that predate and are unrelated to any other modern association those hoods have acquired, drawing crowds that make Semana Santa one of the largest annual events in the city's calendar.

These large public processions represent a specifically lay and confraternal elaboration of the stational Jerusalem liturgy this entry's first article traces, organised and funded by centuries-old lay brotherhoods rather than directly by the institutional church hierarchy, and comparable large-scale Holy Week processions, often modelled at some historical remove on the Spanish pattern through colonial-era transmission, are kept in cities across Latin America and the Philippines, so that in these places Holy Week is experienced primarily as a large, highly organised public street event rather than as a set of services attended mainly inside church buildings.