Good Friday in Sardinia

The first time I visited Ulassai, in the mountainous Barbagia region of Sardinia, was eight years ago. The buildings of the former railway station had been transformed into a memorial museum dedicated to the town’s most famous native daughter, the textile artist Maria Lai (1919–2013). At the time, an exhibition of her presepi—her Nativity scenes—was on display there, and I even wrote about it that Christmas. Now, on Good Friday, we return once again.

“Do you get many visitors?” I ask the cashier at the museum, tucked away among the mountains and reachable only by long, winding roads. “You’re the first.” “Today?” “No, this year.”

It turns out that after several months of renovation, the museum has reopened its doors today. Work is still underway in the larger building, which houses Maria Lai’s tapestries, but the smaller one, dedicated to her sketches and installations, is already open to visitors. And today admission is free—though we only learn the reason for that later.

On the ground floor of the small station building, we are greeted by an installation I had never seen before, filling the entire room. At its centre stands a table covered with a white cloth, bearing books and loaves of bread—one of Lai’s recurring motifs. Around the walls hang fourteen long, narrow black textiles: the fourteen Stations of the Cross, which also reinterpret the table within the context of the Last Supper.

The individual stations are concentrated in the centre of each long textile, much like the main column of text on a Chinese hanging scroll. The scenes are formed by loosely stitched outlines in white thread—partly figurative, partly suggested through the abstraction of tangled strands. Beneath the image, the threads gather together and trail down in long loose tassels. These scenes, rendered with free, calligraphic contours, feel very familiar from the Catholic art of the 1970s and 1980s, for example from the works of Péter Prokop.

The brief description explains why I had never seen these Stations before. Maria Lai created them in 1981 for the Ulassai house of the Congregazione delle Pie Suore della Redenzione. Founded in Cagliari in 1935, this congregation of religious sisters dedicated itself to supporting and protecting the poor, especially women seeking to escape prostitution, abusive families, drug addiction, or criminal environments.

During the years they lived in Ulassai, between 1975 and 1983, the sisters also cared for the elderly and the sick, taught children, and offered sewing and embroidery classes to young girls. When they returned to Cagliari in 1983, they took the textiles with them. It was only in 2022 that they informed the Maria Lai Museum in Ulassai that they would be happy to donate them for permanent display—on one condition: that they should be freely accessible to the public every Good Friday.

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By seven o’clock in the evening, the parish church of Mamoiada is completely packed. There is barely any room left even at the back—let alone near the altar, if you are hoping to photograph the ceremony.

In southern Italy, Sardinia and Sicily, regions that remained under Spanish influence for centuries, Good Friday is marked not by Passion plays in the form of a teatrum sacrum, as in many Catholic regions of northern Europe, but by what follows the Crucifixion: the Deposition from the Cross and the Entombment. The ceremony known as s’iscravamentu begins in the parish church. A large cross stands before the altar, bearing a life-sized figure of the crucified Christ.

“If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross, and we will believe in you,” the parish priest quotes from the Gospel of Matthew. “But Christ chose to let us help Him down.”

Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, dressed in garments resembling episcopal vestments—or perhaps simply in an Orientalising style—remove the statue from the cross. Kneeling, they present it to the mourning Virgin Mary and her two companions, standing nearby in black. Mary then sings a lament in Sardinian, much like the Sett’ispadas de dolore, with a text reminiscent of the Old Hungarian Lament of Mary. Listening to it helps one understand the role that Hungary’s oldest surviving poem, from around 1250-1280, may once have played within the liturgy.

The two figures in red turn toward us as well, presenting the body that died for our sake. A crowd of altar servers dressed in white receives it from them and places it on a bier. The procession then sets off from the church, winding its way through the labyrinth of Mamoiada’s ancient streets, some of which have been in use for thousands of years.

The crowd grows steadily larger. Many people watch from their windows, balconies, or doorsteps. Candles burn in windows and doorways all along the route. Eventually the procession reaches a small chapel at the opposite end of the town. Here Jesus is laid in the tomb. On Easter Sunday morning, after His Resurrection, He will emerge from here and make His way to the main square, where He will meet His Mother once again.

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In Nuoro Cathedral, the s’iscravamentu begins at midnight on Good Friday. It is immediately clear that we are in a larger town: here there are enough skilled singers to perform, in the traditional Sardinian polyphonic style, a poetic Sardinian paraphrase of the Hail Mary, the Deus ti salvet Maria.

Here, the carved figure of Christ has movable arms. Following the parish priest’s successive instructions, the two assistants remove the nails step by step and gently lower first the left arm and then the right.

The scene is strikingly reminiscent of Spanish Romanesque paintings, carvings, and even life-sized sculptural groups that clearly depict the Deposition from the Cross as it once appeared in sacred drama. In Sardinia, that sacred drama is still alive a thousand years later. Then again, what is a thousand years in comparison with the island’s chronology, which preserves the legacy of many thousands more?