Terreiro

The terreiro is the house-and-compound that is the fundamental unit of Candomble and of Umbanda, and it is at once a place of worship, a community and a line of descent.

Not a congregation

A terreiro is not a congregation that gathers and disperses but a religious family gathered around a presiding priest or priestess, the pai or mae de santo, into which members are initiated and to which they belong. The compound contains the shrines of the orixas, the rooms for initiation and seclusion, and the barracao, the hall where the public ceremonies of drumming, song and possession are held. The house is the setting for the whole life of the tradition, from the private work of initiation to the great festivals at which the orixas descend to dance among their people.

Lineage and survival

Each terreiro traces its authority to the house in which its founder was initiated, so the terreiros form lines of descent, and the oldest houses of Salvador in Bahia carry particular prestige as founts of tradition. The institution was the means by which the religion survived slavery and long persecution, since the house could preserve and transmit knowledge within a bounded community, and the terreiro remains the guardian of that knowledge. In recent decades leading terreiros have been recognised as sites of cultural heritage, a public standing that follows a long history in which they were policed and suppressed.

The terreiro form took shape in Salvador da Bahia in the early nineteenth century, built by enslaved and freed Yoruba, Fon and Central African women and men who had to reconstruct their religious worlds from memory rather than from any surviving institution transplanted whole across the Atlantic. The house most often named as the oldest is Casa Branca, also called Ile Axe Iya Nasso Oka, founded by Yoruba priestesses in the early decades of the century and treated by many later terreiros as the root lineage, the matriz, from which their own founding priests or priestesses trace descent.

Several of Bahia's other major terreiros, including Gantois and Ile Axe Opo Afonja, emerged directly from succession disputes and departures among Casa Branca's own priestesses over the rest of the nineteenth century, so that the houses that look today like separate, independent traditions are in a real sense one lineage that split repeatedly rather than several unrelated foundings.

Because Brazilian law and colonial custom generally denied African religious practice any recognised institutional standing, this branching first happened as a matter of family and household authority rather than through any formal charter, leaving oral lineage claims, not documents, as the primary record of how one terreiro relates to another.