I begin by greeting those attending this event in the Church of Santa María del Moral in Villafáfila and thanking the Junta Pro Semana Santa for remembering me by proposing to make this year's Holy Week proclamation, despite my advanced age of 93, of my weakened health since I had a stroke in 2009 and of my material impossibility to travel to Villafáfila because I have been in a wheelchair for two years. But I keep enough mental clarity to face this assignment with the help of my son José Luis, who is a historian by profession, just as I have been a historian of Villafáfila by devotion for twenty years of my life. Without a doubt, this has been the main reason for this invitation, for which I feel very honored and grateful, in particular to the people who have sent it to me through my son: Jesús Ruiz, José Luis Domínguez and Elías Rodríguez, my friend and also a historian from Villafáfila, with whom I have shared this hobby and some publications. I am especially grateful for the presence of my relatives, both from the town and those who have come from other places, regretting not being able to be with them today.

When I accepted the Board's kind proposal a few months ago, I didn't know how I could do it. To clarify myself, the first thing I did was read the proclamations that have been given in this Church in the last six years by people I have known. Of them, the one that has inspired me the most has been that of Volusiano Calzada Fidalgo, because he has several points in common with me: we were both born in Villafáfila in a family of farmers and, after completing our first studies at the village school, We attended high school in a religious school in the province of Zamora, and then lived far from Villafáfila (he, much further than me, since he was a missionary in America), but always longing for our homeland. Volusiano Calzada was born in 1942 and dedicated part of his proclamation to recounting his life. I too, almost twenty years older than him, I am going to tell you, my countrymen, something of my life, especially in relation to Villafáfila. I lived here as a child and as a young man, until my work as a teacher took me to other regions of Spain, from where I always came to spend part of the summer, until my illness and the infirmities of my age prevented me from returning from a fleeting trip in 2010, as was my greatest wish. But, although I cannot be here physically, rest assured that every day I find myself in Villafáfila mentally and I often talk about Villafáfila to the people who take care of me in the residence, where I have lived for three years, and to the closest relatives friends with whom I spend Sundays: my son, my daughter-in-law, my mother-in-law and my grandchildren. until my job as a teacher took me to other regions of Spain, from where I always came to spend part of the summer, until my illness and the infirmities of my age prevented me from returning from a fleeting trip in 2010, as was my greatest wish . But, although I cannot be here physically, rest assured that every day I find myself in Villafáfila mentally and I often talk about Villafáfila to the people who take care of me in the residence, where I have lived for three years, and to the closest relatives friends with whom I spend Sundays: my son, my daughter-in-law, my mother-in-law and my grandchildren. until my job as a teacher took me to other regions of Spain, from where I always came to spend part of the summer, until my illness and the infirmities of my age prevented me from returning from a fleeting trip in 2010, as was my greatest wish . But, although I cannot be here physically, rest assured that every day I find myself in Villafáfila mentally and I often talk about Villafáfila to the people who take care of me in the residence, where I have lived for three years, and to the closest relatives friends with whom I spend Sundays: my son, my daughter-in-law, my mother-in-law and my grandchildren.

I came into the world on June 10, 1923, at the time of the Monarchy of Alfonso XIII, the great-grandfather of the current king, a few months before General Miguel Primo de Rivera established his Dictatorship until 1930. I was born in a house on Calle Del Moral, where my maternal grandmother Elisa Granado lived, now a widow (due to the death of her husband Manuel Alonso), and my parents Consolación Alonso and Julio de la Granja, from whom I inherited her nickname: "Bomba", which in turn came from from the name of a horse that my grandfather Emilio had. I was baptized in this Santa María del Moral Church. My birth house adjoined the house of some relatives of my maternal grandparents: the parents of Tarsilo and Victoria Blanco, deeply rooted in the town: D. Tarsilo, married to his cousin Anastasia Sánchez, She was the teacher for many years and Victoria ran the bus line from Villafáfila to Zamora, together with her husband Agustín García, better known as “el Americano”. My family has always been very close to theirs and their descendants; hence some of these have wanted to be present at this act.

My historical research on Villafáfila led me to investigate my family origins in the 19th century. The first ascendant surnamed De la Granja who came to this town was a Civil Guard sergeant named Juan, a native of Paredes de Nava in Palencia, who was assigned to Villafáfila, where he married Gaspara Costilla, from a family of ancestry: his coat of arms it is on the ground of this very Church. Their son was my grandfather: Emilio de la Granja Costilla, who was a doctor in Villafáfila for a long time and married Ángeles Ruiz, a landowner. That is why my grandfather was also a farmer. When he died in 1937, he divided his land among his six children, although only two of them stayed in the town and were farmers: my uncle Juan and my father Julio, who inherited and bought the family house on Botica street from his brothers. . I still keep this house, as well as the farms inherited from my parents. I also had a small winery, where I made wine for a few years. My father died prematurely in 1953, forcing my mother to sell her cattle (except for a few chickens) and to lease her land. She continued to live in Villafáfila until a few years before she passed away: she died in 1990 in Alicante. For a long time the lands I own in the town have been cultivated by Leonardo Rodríguez del Teso and my nephew Jesús Rodríguez de la Granja, son of Germán, who is a year older and in better health than me. which forced my mother to sell the cattle she had (except for a few chickens) and to lease her land. She continued to live in Villafáfila until a few years before she passed away: she died in 1990 in Alicante. For a long time the lands I own in the town have been cultivated by Leonardo Rodríguez del Teso and my nephew Jesús Rodríguez de la Granja, son of Germán, who is a year older and in better health than me. which forced my mother to sell the cattle she had (except for a few chickens) and to lease her land. She continued to live in Villafáfila until a few years before she passed away: she died in 1990 in Alicante. For a long time the lands I own in the town have been cultivated by Leonardo Rodríguez del Teso and my nephew Jesús Rodríguez de la Granja, son of Germán, who is a year older and in better health than me.

After nine decades, I hardly have any memories of my childhood, which took place in the years that preceded the Civil War. I remember the priest D. Francisco Lera, who had problems in the Second Republic. I studied at the village school; then there were two schools for boys and one for girls. I did the first courses of the baccalaureate in Zamora, being an intern in a school and going to class at the institute, and the last ones as an intern student in the Escolapios de Toro, spending the vacations with my parents in Villafáfila, where I helped in the work of the field during summer. In the forties I studied Chemistry at the University of Salamanca, where I traveled by train from La Tabla station. My Faculty was right in front of the Salamanca Cathedral. The teaching was very theoretical and not very practical.

When I studied Chemistry I thought I would work in a factory, but it wasn't like that, instead my profession immediately became teaching. After a course in Madrid, preparing for my doctorate, thanks to an ad I read in the ABC newspaperI went to Almadén (a town with rich mercury mines in the province of Ciudad Real) to teach at an academy. It was there that I met my wife, Pilar Sainz, whom I married in 1951 and from whom I had four children: three boys and a girl, who died a few days after being born. Since that year I have been a professor of Physics and Chemistry in High Schools: first, six courses in Daimiel, an agricultural town in Ciudad Real; then, twenty years in Llodio, an industrial town in Álava near Bilbao, and a course in Baracaldo (Vizcaya), and, finally, from 1979 until my retirement in 1988 in Alicante. I have lived almost a quarter of a century in this Levantine city and even longer in Bilbao, at whose University I was also a professor at several Technical Schools, for which I published a manual entitledChemistry topics in 1969. Since 2003 I stayed permanently in Bilbao, where my wife died in 2011.

I am not going to tire you with more details of my life. Today is Palm Sunday and Holy Week begins, with which the proclamation you have commissioned me has to do. Therefore, I must tell my memories of what Holy Week was like in my distant youth, a time so different from today, and I will do so briefly.

A peculiar tradition of Villafáfila, which has been preserved to the present day, took place shortly before the carnival: they were the "Thursdays of compadres and comadres", which were celebrated separately: on a Thursday the boys met in a house and ate, among other things, a dessert called ears, and the next the girls did the same on their own. Holy Week began on Palm Sunday with the "auction of saints", in which the highest bidders would take the auctioned floats. The one with the highest auction used to be the passage with the image of Jesus Nazareno, for which there was great devotion in the town, while the one with the lowest auction was the Cristo de la Urna, which was the heaviest. I remember having taken the step with the image of San Juan. It was customary for young women to wear new dresses on Palm Sunday. You already know the saying: Palm Sunday, who does not release anything has neither feet nor hands.

The City Council hired a preacher, who came from Benavente, Zamora or Astorga, to deliver eight sermons, referring to the different chapters of the Passion of Christ, and to confess. As many people then fulfilled the Easter precept, his confessional was very crowded on those days of Holy Week.

An important moment for the children of that time was that of the “darkness”, when we played the carracas and the carrancones in the church producing a lot of noise, which bothered the priest I mentioned before: D. Francisco Lera. I kept my carrancón and a few years ago, after repairing it, I donated it to the Zamora Ethnographic Museum.

The processional parade was accompanied by the singing of the "Miserere", which was followed by the "Forgive your people, Lord" when approaching the church. The most interesting procession was the "Encuentro" on Good Friday morning. From the Churches of San Martín and Santa María del Moral came the steps of Jesús Nazareno, the Virgin Mary and Saint John; the latter were located at the ends of the town square, in the center of which was the passage of Jesús Nazareno. Then the preacher would say: “Juan run to see María”, and the people would add: “she is waiting for you at Uncle Chafarría's door”. Upon hearing these words, the Paso de San Juan ran towards that of the Virgin Mary, before which the penitents bowed, to immediately continue to meet the Paso de Jesús Nazareno, where the bows were repeated. The attending public was aware of these bows, because they showed the state in which the penitents found themselves after having spent the night drinking lemonade, wine, brandy and chocolate with churros. The young people carried the image of Saint John, which sometimes ended up badly damaged by falling and breaking a piece. It wasn't very uplifting, but it happened.

Villafáfila's devotion to Jesus of Nazarene was always very great. This is corroborated by an event that our ancestors told us (my father told me): at the beginning of the 20th century the parish priest wanted to sell his image, but he could not do it because, the neighbors found out, there was a great tumult before the Church of San Martín, to the point that the Civil Guard had to protect the priest since his physical integrity was in danger.

Every four years, in leap years, the "Descent" was celebrated on the afternoon of Good Friday. It consisted of the representation that the priests carried out through the images of the crucifixion, the descent and the burial, in the Urn, of Jesus Christ, which was followed by the procession. In the services of that day the Cross of mother-of-pearl was adored, which, according to tradition, had been sent from Jerusalem.

The Town Hall of the town, with its mayor at its head, attended the liturgical celebrations occupying the "bench", a prominent place in this Church of Santa María del Moral.

Such are the few memories that I have of Holy Week during my young years, because since I started working, got married and had children in the early fifties, I was only able to come to Villafáfila in the summers, taking advantage of the fact that the teachers We had a long summer vacation.

I am going to dedicate the last part of this proclamation to explaining to you what my main occupation was during the two decades after my retirement at the age of 65, since it focused on Villafáfila. If, as has been said, the homeland is childhood, without a doubt mine is Villafáfila, where I was born and raised as a child. Having lived almost all the time outside my town, I considered then, since 1988, that I should pay off the debt I had contracted with my small homeland and decided to dedicate myself from now on to the study of its art and its history, barely known and investigated. This contributed to my discovering that my true intellectual vocation was not the sciences, to which I had dedicated myself since my student years at the University of Salamanca, but the arts, specifically painting and sculpture, and history, especially of the Middle Ages and the Modern Age.

Valga como botón de muestra este ejemplo: Me gustaba el dibujo y sabía dibujar, habiendo hecho los numerosos dibujos incluidos en mis libros de Química, pero nunca había tenido ocasión de pintar. Poco después de jubilarme me matriculé en una academia y aprendí a pintar. ¿Para qué, os preguntaréis? Pues para pintar lo que más me gustaba de Villafáfila, cosa que hice durante varios años: así, pinté cuadros de esta misma Iglesia Santa María del Moral, el Ayuntamiento, la plaza San Martín, mi casa familiar, los palomares, las salinas, etc. Aunque esos cuadros, que adornan las paredes de sendos pisos en Bilbao y Alicante, tengan muy escaso valor artístico, para mí valen mucho sentimentalmente. No descarto que algún día puedan estar en Villafáfila. De todos ellos hay uno al que tengo especial cariño: es un retrato de mi nieta Rebeca, vestida con el traje regional, traje típico que heredé de mi madre y regalé a mi única nieta cuando aún era niña, que lo estrenó, según consta en una fotografía de entonces, que me sirvió para pintarlo.

My first historical work was a book, of about 500 pages, entitled Historical, artistic, religious, agricultural and human study of the Royal Monastery of Santa María de Moreruela of the Cistercian Order, published by the Diputación de Zamora in 1990. When I discovered this monastery, so close to Villafáfila, with eight centuries of history, it was not only in ruins (ruins that moved D. Miguel de Unamuno in 1911) and abandoned, but also It served as a stable for cattle as it was located within a privately owned meadow. Fortunately, when I visited it for the last time in 2010, I found that a part had been restored and cultural events are held there. In the dedication of the book I wrote: "To Villafáfila, my people, always in struggle with the Moreruela Monastery, in defense of their rights." And in the prologue he explained the reason for this book: “I have done it to make our land known, so forgotten by everyone, by ourselves; That is why I present to you our Castilla, our Zamora, our Villafáfila, that everything is the same, once great and now small to make known the riches that we possess, unfortunately unknown to ourselves”. In it I maintain that Moreruela was the first of the Cistercian foundations in the Iberian Peninsula in the twelfth century. As an anecdote I will tell you that for this reason I had a controversy with a Galician friar, who claimed that primacy for another Monastery, at the II International Congress on Cistercianism in Galicia and Portugal, held in Orense in 1998. At the end of my communication at said Congress asked the Junta de Castilla y León, owner since 1994 of the ruins of Moreruela, "its reconstruction, because its religion, agriculture, economy and history represent, in past times, a good part of those of our Castilian Region".Moreruela, a monastery in the History of Cistercians , in which the restoration process of Moreruela is already being studied and in which I had the satisfaction of participating thanks to Elías Rodríguez.

Precisely, the Board helped to publish my second book: Villafáfila: History and actuality of a Castilian-Leonese villa, which I had the honor of presenting in this same church on a Sunday in 1996, as some of you may remember. In it he refuted the legend that Villafáfila had been founded by Favila, the Asturian king, son of D. Pelayo, killed by a bear in the 8th century, and showed that it had been founded two centuries later by a peasant named Fáfila, who put its name: “Villa de Fáfila”. In homage to our founder, I managed to get the City Council to dedicate a monument to him, located on Calle Botica, very close to my family home. Of the more than a thousand years of existence of our town, I highlight an event of great importance in the history of Castile and Spain: the Concord of Villafáfila, sealed in the Church of San Martín. Since it disappeared in 1953, in 1990 I had a commemorative tombstone placed in the building built on its site, whose text reads as follows: “Treaty of Villafáfila. In this place, the former Church of San Martín de Villafáfila, talks were held in the year 1506 between King D. Fernando el Católico and the Archduke of Austria D. Felipe el Hermoso for the transfer of the government of the Kingdom of Castile”. In 2006, the City Council put a tombstone on its façade for the V Centenary of the Concord of Villafáfila. And on top of it there is another one that recalls various historical milestones that I studied in the book: from its foundation by Fáfila in the 10th century to the national reserve for migratory birds since 1986, through the Lordship of the Military Order of Santiago and the Marquis of Tabara. Felipe el Hermoso for the transfer of the government of the Kingdom of Castile”. In 2006, the City Council put a tombstone on its façade for the V Centenary of the Concord of Villafáfila. And on top of it there is another one that recalls various historical milestones that I studied in the book: from its foundation by Fáfila in the 10th century to the national reserve for migratory birds since 1986, through the Lordship of the Military Order of Santiago and the Marquis of Tabara. Felipe el Hermoso for the transfer of the government of the Kingdom of Castile”. In 2006, the City Council put a tombstone on its façade for the V Centenary of the Concord of Villafáfila. And on top of it there is another one that recalls various historical milestones that I studied in the book: from its foundation by Fáfila in the 10th century to the national reserve for migratory birds since 1986, through the Lordship of the Military Order of Santiago and the Marquis of Tabara.

This book about Villafáfila was not only mine, because it had a second author. As I indicated in its prologue, I included “a study carried out on the parishes of Villafáfila by our remembered Rdo. Mr. Camilo Pérez Bragado, as a posthumous tribute to him”. D. Camilo, as we all knew him, arrived as a priest in the fifties and was the parish priest of this Church until his death. An affable man loved by the people, he devoted himself to investigating the seven parishes that Villafáfila once had: Santa Marta, San Andrés, San Juan, El Salvador, San Pedro, San Martín and Santa María del Moral. In his work I studied the images, so I incorporated black and white photographs of several of them.

The work of D. Camilo served as an incentive to write my latest book: The art of a Castilian-Leonese villa: Villafáfila, which in 2008 was edited by the Zamora UNED with the collaboration of the Florián de Ocampo Institute of Zamoran Studies, which contributed 64 color photographs of the artistic works mentioned in its pages. Many of them are religious images, which are found in this church (the steps of Holy Week) or in the parish Museum, created by the current parish priest, D. Agapito Gómez, whose meritorious work I want to publicly acknowledge in this act. Four photographs show the armchairs of San Atilano and San Froilán: two armchairs that were in poor condition and that I managed to have restored; The fact that they were in the exhibition of the Ages of Man in Zamora gives an idea of ​​their artistic value.

Such has been, in short, the work in which I threw myself with enthusiasm as soon as I retired until my poor health and the ailments of my age prevented me from continuing with it. I value much more these works written as an amateur historian than those I did as a professor of Chemistry. That is why I have asked my son that, when he dies, in the obituary, under my name and surnames, these words should appear: "Historian of Villafáfila". It's something I take pride in and would like to be remembered for. It is the legacy that he left to my countrymen as the old Castilian that I am. For this reason, I ask all of you, especially the municipal authorities, to conserve and value our rich historical and artistic heritage, which is worth spreading and knowing, along with our natural wealth:

I am going to conclude this proclamation, which is unusual because it is also my farewell to you. For this reason, I am very grateful to the people who thought of me to pronounce it and I greatly regret not being able to be with all of you now, who are listening to his reading for my son. It is significant that I chose two photographs of this Santa María del Moral Church to illustrate the covers of my books on Villafáfila. It reflects the importance it has had in my life: I was baptized in its font and I will come here on my last trip to Villafáfila, when God calls me. Then, I will return to my land, to my roots, to be reunited forever with my parents and my very dear relatives in the family pantheon. And I end with the dedication that I put in the book about its history:

Author:

Jose Luis Dominguez Martinez.

Text:

D. Manuel de la Granja Alonso.

Town crier of Holy Week 2017.

Photography:

Jose Luis Dominguez Martinez.

Transcription and montage:

Jose Luis Dominguez Martinez.

All text, photographs, transcription and montage, their rights belong to their authors, any type of use is prohibited without authorization.

All text and photography has been authorized for storage, treatment, work, transcription and assembly to José Luis Domínguez Martínez, its dissemination on villafafila.net, and any other means that is authorized.