Market Day

On Sunday we travelled up into the highlands to visit Chichicastengo where a very large market is held twice a week. The whole town becomes the market, 20,000 Maya live in the local villages and they flood into the town for the market. There are ‘specialist’ streets such as the street of foods, the street of candles and incense, the street of animals where baskets stuffed full of chickens and turkeys are displayed along with pigs held by ropes around their necks, and streets and streets of stalls selling Maya woven goods and the steps of the church which becomes the flower market as the Maya women in traditional dress sell flowers. The town is a strange mixture of commercialism and mysticism as here we encountered another blend of catholic and indigenous religions. There is a time-honoured tradition of brotherhoods focused on saint worship – which are thinly disguised Maya gods. Inside the church, which was full of the smoke from numerous copal incense-burners, amassed around the walls were statues of saints dressed in colourful attire and in front of them people burning candles and murmuring incantations.
We respected the injunction not to photograph inside the church but later in the morning we were able to take photographs of the saints/gods as they were paraded through the streets accompanied by the brotherhoods and women from different villages (identifiable by colours of dress that are unique to each community) as well as musicians creating a cacophony of sounds and, of course, clouds of incense.