A grinning US President Barack Obama in a white tutu kicks Russian President Vladimir Putin in the privates. German Chancellor Angela Merkel bends and bares her bottom.
These are just three of the hundreds of satirical effigies mounted at the Fallas festival in Valencia, Spain, which celebrates its noisy finale this week.
Politicians, celebrities and fantasy characters star in the colorful, often grotesque ninots — groups of cardboard and polystyrene models built by local artists and placed in the streets.
Photo: AFP
For nearly three weeks, giant firecrackers have boomed around the city and the smell of fried pastries and paella have filled the air, leading up to tomorrow’s finale when about 760 ninots are to be burned in a last night of revelry.
“The Fallas are a way of life for me. It’s practically a religion. It’s an act of devotion,” 26-year-old high school teacher Vicente Rodriguez said.
Like his father and grandfather before him, he is a Fallero — a member of one of 380 local Falla committees.
“I am happy to work all year just so I can burn a Falla,” he says. “Then I cry and I start all over again.”
In a country with many quirky folk festivals, the Fallas is one of the most popular. It coincides with the start of the bullfighting season, but utterly upstages it.
More than 1 million tourists come to the eastern seaside city to see the extravagant sculptures — some of them more than 20m tall — before they go up in flames.
Crudeness and humor reign — in one sculpture, the leader of the rising left-wing party Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, sits on a lavatory holding toilet paper printed with the face of conservative Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
However, some exhibits are more darkly topical: In one, a yellow pencil stands in red spilled ink in an homage to the victims of the extremist massacre at the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
All but two of the ninots will burn — the winning pair voted for by the public will end up in the local Fallero Museum.
With likely roots in pagan springtime rites, the Fallas in their current form are traced back to the 18th century, when carpenters would burn the offcuts from their workshops in the street, the Fallero Museum’s Ximo Palomarez said.
The satirical flavor took hold when locals began using the discarded wood to make torches in the form of dolls representing well-known figures.
“It was a way for the people to humorously criticize and ridicule the powerful who abused their power,” Palomarez said.
“From the very beginning, they were a way of attacking the authorities and the Catholic Church, which tried to ban them,” Palomarez said.
After an opening early morning salvo on the last Sunday in February, more than 100kg of giant firecrackers are detonated each afternoon, draping the city center in white smoke.
The final day’s mega firecracker storm in the city’s main square is a deafening event known as “the earthquake.”
Local Fallas associations typically spend tens of thousands of euros building the effigies to compete with other neighborhoods. In 2009, during Spain’s economic crisis, the most expensive cost 900,000 euros (US$950,350).
This year’s Fallas budget is 6.9 million euros, organizers said.
The 380 Fallas committees run raffles and other events throughout the year to raise money, boosting the subsidy granted by city hall.
“It is a way to teach small children how to organize a party and share with others,” says Carmen Sancho, a member of one of the oldest Fallas families in Valencia.
She was preparing to join 100,000 others yesterday for one of the festival’s highlights — a parade to lay flowers below a statue of the city’s patron saint, Our Lady of the Abandoned.
Like countless other women and girls in the city, Sancho will wear an ornate crinoline dress, hand-embroidered in 19th-century style.
After burning the other Fallas on Thursday, revelers are to then head to the city’s main square to see the biggest of all, a 22m-high lion, set alight.
“Some people from Valencia leave town during the Fallas, because they don’t like it,” 29-year-old local welder and Fallero Hector Sebastia said.
“They say it’s just firecrackers and drunkenness all day. They just don’t get it,” he said.
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