Burning with Tradition

Lens-Artists Challenge #407: Celebrations Around the World

This week Patti hosts our Lens-Artists Challenge with Celebrations Around the World. In her post, she writes: “Show us joyful, solemn, traditional, or avant-garde festivals, parades, feasts, holidays… to name a few.” Although Brazil is full of celebrations, I’m heading to Portugal this time, to a tradition I’d never heard of before we arrived — one that turned out to be full of vigor, color, and beer. Please visit Patti’s post for more inspiration and a beautiful gallery of celebrations from around the world.

When we were in Portugal for a month-long visit, we stumbled into a college tradition that was entirely unfamiliar to us. It’s called Queima das Fitas — Portuguese for “the burning of the ribbons.” It was the beginning of May, and we were in Porto. Everywhere we went, we saw students in cap and gown at all hours of the day and night, gathered in the squares and around the university buildings. At first, we assumed we’d stumbled onto an early graduation ceremony.

Queima das Fitas is a college event that celebrates the end of the academic year and the graduation of university students. From what I gathered by asking a few of the students we met, each field of study is represented by its own colored ribbon — red for Law, yellow for Medicine, purple for Pharmacy, dark blue for Humanities, and so on, eight colors in all. The ribbons themselves trace back to something wonderfully mundane: nineteenth-century students used colored ribbon to bind their course folders, and over time the ribbon itself became a badge of one’s field of study. Burning or keeping these ribbons at graduation symbolizes the end of student life and the transition into the professional world. The event isn’t reserved for the graduating class alone — alumni from classes long past join the parade too, though in a far more subdued fashion.

Quite unexpectedly, and entirely unplanned, we happened to be in Coimbra on the big day, with a full float parade celebrating the Queima das Fitas. The tradition traces back to the 1850s, when a group of law students marched from the university’s Porta Férrea gate down to the lower town and set their ribbons alight — a gesture other faculties soon copied, until it grew into the citywide celebration we saw. The University of Coimbra, Portugal’s oldest, is where it all began, and its version of the Queima das Fitas remains the largest and best known in the country, though we’d already seen students celebrating a version of it days earlier in Porto. We found ourselves right in the middle of the celebration.

By Sunday afternoon, the festivities were in high gear, and the students had had plenty to drink. We found ourselves working our way through large, boisterous crowds — I kept an eye on my camera, worried it might get sprayed with beer. We sensed just how quickly things could get out of hand when we tried to visit the old cathedral, Sé Velha: it had been closed to visitors for fear of damage to the historic building and its religious art. (The featured photo shows the closed cathedral doors.)

We counted a dozen or more elaborate floats rolling through the streets of Coimbra. The parade began near the university buildings and wound down to the main avenue, floats packed with students and no shortage of alcohol. Students wore caps and gowns or other black-and-white attire, some with paint smeared across their faces and clothes.

What struck me most about this celebration was how peaceful it was. Police were on hand to guide traffic and pedestrians, but we never witnessed anything unruly — just a city fully given over, for one afternoon, to its oldest tradition.

Last week’s Summer Daze challenge was so much fun. I hope you will join this challenge, too. Please don’t forget to use the “lens-artists” hashtag in your posts to help people find your wonderful challenge entries.

Next week, I return with a new challenge. It will go live at noon EST in the USA. Tune in to find out more about the challenge then. Please see this page for more information about the Lens-Artists Challenge and its history. If you don’t want to miss any future challenges, please consider subscribing to the team members’ websites. Here they are:

• Tina of Travels and Trifles.
• Patti of P.A. Moed.
• Ann-Christine of Leya.
• John of Journeys with Johnbo.
• Anne of Slow Shutter Speed.
• Sofia of Photographias.
• Egídio of Through Brazilian Eyes.
• Ritva of Ritva Sillanmäki Photography.
• Beth of Wandering Dawgs.

That is the story behind the shots. For more like this, enjoy these related stories: Cityscapes, Coimbra, Lens-Artists, Portugal. Until the next shoot, keep chasing the light and the wonders it reveals.

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Source:

• Queima das Fitas — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queima_das_Fitas