Obidos: History relived
The town of Obidos in district of Leiria, comes alive every year at this time of the season, writes Annie Datta.
The walled town of Óbidos in the district of Leiria, Portugal, comes alive every year at this time of the season attracting tourists in large numbers. The town draws its basic identity and sustenance from tourism. It is en route to Fatima, a well-known pilgrimage town. While in Óbidos it seems as if one is walking through a picture postcard. Narrow cobbled streets overhung with bougainvillea and colourful flowers peeping from medieval windows make the town picturesque.
Tourism reaches its peak with the arrival of the Mercado Medieval or the medieval fair. Earlier there used to be an Arab fair too. The two now have partly overlapped with mint tea and sweets available in the ambience of a tent straight from the Arabian Nights live with music and ballet dance. It's another matter that the Portuguese tourists have yet to develop a liking for the exotic chá.
The fair often looks like an extended stage where the gap between actors and audience disappears. One could be surrounded by a group of king's men hunting down a prisoner while another stands pilloried the way it happened in the Middle Ages.
The fair recalls medieval times. The line between fact and fiction narrows considerably with ironsmiths, carpenters, tarot readers, musicians, women in medieval dresses capering to folk rhythms emanating from bagpipes and drums, men on stilts, jugglers, hunters with falcons on their arms being all over the place.
Meat is cooked over coals the traditional way and served in dishes of clay. Men could be seen fencing on the ramparts while a hangman's noose awaits a mock execution. There is visible commitment to the success of the fair both from the town dwellers and the Câmara Municipal de Óbidos. The interesting part of the fair is the unconventional treatment meted out to visitors encouraged to become part of the medieval atmosphere by wearing period attire. One could hire such costumes at the entrance. Entry fee is waived for the participants.
More than entertainment, the medieval fair has an aesthetic and educative side to it. It could be fairly categorised as a theme park or in situ museum. No modern element is allowed in the fair. Whatever one wears, buys, eats or sells is strictly in keeping with the theme of the fair. Such medieval fairs not only bring back times gone by but make the present generation aware of history (the area was taken from the Moors in 1148) as actual siege of the castle of Óbidos is recapitulated with sufficient realism. The standards on the walls, the flags on the battlements, the mock warfare all give relevance to a site otherwise left ruined by time.
While such enactment has museological connotations in a place like Portugal, one recalls with vividness the medieval mode of life co-present with modern times in a country like India. While it's a problem avoiding beggars and lepers on street crossings in Delhi, a painted beggar needs a lot of artistic preparation and invokes great curiosity here. A beggar's artifice draws people's pity and attention here whereas the actually suffering disabled are shooed away by the nouveaus in a hurry to reach somewhere on the fast expanding map of New Delhi.
Again, only decades ago, I am told, Delhi had tongas on its roads. There were water troughs for horses in places like Daryaganj and Sadar Bazar. Delhi also used to be a camping ground to caravans of gypsies carrying on wheels an outmoded life style. The medieval fair is more or less an enlarged caravan carrying history on wheels. Smaller towns in India are still tied to medieval times using primitive tools to mould wood or leather into both artifacts and items of everyday use. Time's passage in the West has turned what is contemporary in another time zone as objects to be housed in theme parks and museums.