Background

History - Background

The origins of the public manifestations of Holy Week in Burgos are to be found in the liturgical representations that, from at least the 13th century, flourished in Castile.

Benedictine and Cistercian monks were the first to introduce liturgical drama through short pieces, known as “tropes,” inserted into the liturgical text. In Castile, the earliest documentary evidence appears in a breviary from the Monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos: a trope belonging to the Visitatio Sepulchri cycle (the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord), written at the end of the 11th century.

That such representations were common in medieval churches is confirmed by the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X the Wise, drafted in the second half of the 13th century.

These strictly religious or devotional enactments gradually evolved into theatrical texts—religious dramas written for performance—intended to inspire devotion, feeling, and spiritual emotion among the faithful. Thus became popular the representations of the Descent from the Cross (giving rise to articulated-armed Christs, such as the Most Holy Christ of Burgos), the “Sermon of the Passion” (precursor of today’s Sermon of the Seven Last Words, widespread throughout our towns), the Way of the Cross, the tradition of visiting the Eucharist at the Monument on the night of Holy Thursday, and the “Good Friday of the Cross Pardon,” consisting of the release of a prisoner on Good Friday.

Devotion to the Holy Cross emerged early in Christian history. In Burgos, the first Brotherhood of the Holy Cross was founded in 1181, among whose founders was the Bishop of Burgos, Don Marino. Before 1214, there was already a convent dedicated to Saint Francis in Burgos, where surviving documents indicate the presence of the Brotherhood of the Vera Cruz. Fr. Bernardo Palacios, O.M., in his History of the City of Burgos (1729), notes that in the Convent of San Francisco “many great brotherhoods are founded… among them that of the Cross, which holds the procession that passes through the entire city on Holy Thursday with many floats representing the mysteries of that day.”