Winter over? Or cold for 40 days? "Oracle of the Bear"

February 2 is the liturgical recurrence in the Christian cult of the "Presentation of Jesus in the temple", which after the Second Vatican Council, became the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in which the rite of blessing of candles is celebrated, symbol of the Light of Christ that illuminates the people, which then gives rise to the name Candlemas.

 

This Christian festival followed a pagan celebration which, according to some historians and scholars, was born in Ireland and is "the Imbolc festival" (or even Oimelc, or Imbolic), an ancient event that fell at the end of the cold and dark season, between winter solstice and spring equinox.

 

The second day of February has become a propitiatory day to decree the end or otherwise of the cold season which gives way to the first notes of spring. The variable that shifts the balance between one season and another is the presence or absence of the sun.

 

All over Italy the sayings are similar, but between the north and the south there are reversals of factors. In fact, in Lombardy the saying goes "A la Madona da la Sciriœura dol winter a semm da fœura ma s'al fioca or al tira twenty forty days a semm anmò dent wind forty days we are still inside) or in Veneto "if there is sun in candlestick of winter semo fòra, if it rains and the wind blows in winter semo in" (If there is sun at Candlemas from winter we are outside vice versa in winter we are Vice versa in the south the presence of the sun indicates the permanence of winter for at least another 40 days.

 

Candlemas, in the reality of the Murgia area, also takes the name of "Festa dell'Orso". The story tells that centuries ago, in the territory, there was the Marsicano brown bear which at the time was common in central / southern Italy from the Marche to Puglia. The Marsicano bear, now present in a few specimens only in Abruzzo by now, needs two substantial things: forest cover and rocky hollows or caves where it can hibernate. Before there was the great deforestation that industrial civilization wanted, these two characteristics were very common in the Apulian territory.

 

According to tradition, the behavior of the bear in the hibernation phase decreed the end of winter or not, in fact if on February 2, taking advantage of the beautiful sunny day, the bear came out of his den and rebuilt the haystack (a sarc'n ), that is the warm bed, then the winter lasted at least another 40 days, if vice versa, the day was rainy or even with snow, the bear having to stay in the den sanctioned the end of winter.

 

The bear in the collective imagination takes on an ambivalent semantic connotation, it can be good and at the same time bad and therefore in the representation it can be familiar and at the same time strange, disturbing or funny. On these reinterpretations the “bear party” was born in the context of the Putignano Carnival rites; a lyrical-theatrical representation staged, in the alleys of the historic village, by the Hybris Association with fifty actors, figures, dancers and musicians who interact with two imposing bears made of papier-mâché staging five acts: The bear hunt, the capture, the trial for his misdeeds, the death sentence to end with the meteorological oracle.

 

From these stories mixed with legends every year there is the anniversary of the "Bear Festival"