Chichicastenango-4: Santo Tomas Church
What is Chichicastenango? It’s the 50 shades of pink, that makes you smile when you first see it, out of surprise and joy, a story created by the original Mayans with their colorful lives in this small city, in their local pink&purple dresses.
This pink shades turn into a rainbow on Market days, Thursdays and Sundays, when one of the largest outdoor markets of Central America happens. Of course you need some rain to form rainbow, a rain of vendors&tourists pushing each other in narrow, loudy streets, either to buy the best items or earn the best cash if you don’t bargain to half price of what they ask (I’m not kidding about the half price).
But what is more interesting is the Mayans that live here, who managed to preserve their Mayan past and mix it with Christianity, with shaman looking cofradias (brotherhoods/guilds). The original name of this city is, Chichicastenango de Santo Tomas. So, the patron saint of this city is Santo Tomas, where there’s a dedicated cofradia to it, to honor him, to arrange celebrations and rituals in front of the Santo Tomas Church.
The church is built in 1545, on a pre-columbian temple platform by conquistadors. However, the original stairs going into the temple is still preserved. Each of the 18 stairs that go into church (temple) stands for 1 month in Maya calendar, with 20 days in each month. Although it’s a Christian church, cofrades and local people perform Mayan rituals inside or in front of the church, by burning fires and praying while sitting in front of it, burning incenses, waving pots with smoke coming out, putting puppets of Santo Tomas, San Jose and San Sebastian (each belonging to 3 biggest cofradias of Chichi) inside the church to pray them and put money, rum and flower on them, after they march these puppets in streets with lots of attention.
Every year in 21st of Dec, they honor their patron Santo Tomas with one of the biggest fiestas of Guatemala. Even “The Telegraph” listed it as one of the 10 biggest street celebrations in the world. Christmas is not really cared by Mayans of Chichi. Fiesta in Guatemala means, lots of fireworks, firecrackers, any type of colorful&loudy explosives that you can think of. Team of men work all the day, to make sure something is exploding anytime and anywhere. If they manage to upgrade their obsessions with explosives to rockets&nukes, they can easily rule over the world. During these explosions, people in costume dance all day long, in live music that can be heard from the other part of the country.