Sara la Kali

The heat arrives before the dark does. Down the worn steps into the crypt at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer the air thickens with wax and breath, hundreds of candles burning at once under a low stone ceiling, and at the centre of it stands a small dark-faced woman buried to the lips in dresses. Every gown was carried there by somebody. Satin over lace over brocade, this year’s laid across last year’s, until the figure underneath is more offering than statue. A woman reaches through the crowd, pats her on the cheek the way you would greet an aunt, presses a palm to where the heart would be under all that cloth, touches her feet, and says quietly whatever she came to say.

The story behind her begins in a boat with no oar and no sail. After the crucifixion, according to a legend that took shape in Provence and reached its familiar form in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend, a party of the first Christians was pushed out from the coast of Palestine and left to drown: Mary Salome, mother of the apostles John and James; Mary Jacobe; Mary Magdalene; Martha and her brother Lazarus; and others depending on who is telling it. The sea carried them west instead of down. They came ashore on the flat, salt-bitten edge of the Camargue at a place that would eventually take its name from them.

Sara is the part of the story nobody can agree on. The earliest text that names her is a manuscript now in the library at Arles, written around 1521 by Vincent Philippon, an official of the county of Provence, and there she is an Egyptian servant who walks the Camargue collecting alms to keep the small Christian community fed. Another telling has her left behind on the shore, weeping as her mistresses are shoved out onto the water, refusing to be spared; Mary Salome throws her cloak across the waves, and Sara steps out onto the wool as if it were a raft and floats to them. The Camargue’s own version turns the whole thing around. In that one she is not a servant and not a passenger at all, but a woman of high birth already living here, chief of her people in the umbrella pines, perhaps a priestess of theirs, who saw the boat coming and went down to meet it, and was baptised along with her tribe. Elsewhere she is confused with an abbess of a Libyan convent whose feast falls on 13 July, or with a Sara martyred in Persia in the company of two Marys and a Martha.

A Belgian book of 1956 by Franz de Ville gave the Romani their own account, and it is the one most often quoted: Sara the Kali, noble-born, leading her tribe on the banks of the Rhône, whose people practised a polytheistic religion and once a year carried the statue of Astarte on their shoulders into the sea to be blessed, and who was warned in a vision that the saints who had stood at the death of Jesus were coming and that it was her job to help them. That account has no earlier trace. It appears in one book in 1956, and almost everything since has repeated it.

The documents are colder and much more interesting. A historian who worked through two centuries of the town’s communal archives, the seventeenth and eighteenth, found no mention of Sara the Egyptian anywhere in them and no mention of any Romani procession. The parish registers turn up nothing before the nineteenth century: a basket-maker buried in 1805 after coming for the May feast, a pedlar having his newborn baptised, a traveller from Nîmes in 1816 standing godparent with two more travellers, all of them recorded as illiterate. The prefect’s statistical survey of the Bouches-du-Rhône describes the pilgrimage in detail, the crowds walking in from Languedoc and the Comtat Venaissin, the tents pitched because the town is too small, the plenary indulgences, the Saints invoked chiefly against rabies, and it never once mentions Bohemians. They surface in print in 1852, in a drawing made for the Paris magazine L’Illustration, which shows a Romani woman laying her child on the reliquary caskets exactly as the Arlésiennes and kneeling priests around her are doing.

The caskets are the older devotion, and the reason for them is worth knowing. When René of Anjou obtained papal permission in the 1440s to dig for the holy bodies, the bones identified as the Marys’ were housed in rich reliquaries. Sara’s went into a plain box set under an altar in the underground chapel, because, as an eighteenth-century writer put it without embarrassment, she was not of the same quality as her mistresses. For most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth it was that box the Romani came for. A Paris paper in 1905 described them camped in their wagons outside the village and packed into the crypt for hours around the casket, singing, kissing it, touching baskets and glasses and knives and bottles against it so that whatever it had would come off on their things, burning the largest candles they could buy and carrying the stubs away as talismans. In 1927 a visitor found Sara still living in her old casket, its paint crusted layer on layer like the side of a much-travelled caravan, and noted that the Romani of Béziers had recently clubbed together to buy her a new one and had put up a plaque saying so.

There was no statue. An engraving of the crypt from 1897 shows the altar, the casket, the chairs and the people at prayer, and no figure. A painter who came in 1911 and kept a careful notebook does not mention one. A writer who described the crypt in detail in 1927 does not mention one. Then in 1935 she is there, being carried to the sea. The priest who examined her most closely, having had to rebuild her entire lower half overnight after an accident during a procession and having taken a mould of her in 1955, reported that she is plaster and not wood, that she is not old, and that she was assembled by setting onto a standard body a head that is plainly neither the right scale nor the same sculptor’s work. Somebody made her out of two pieces that did not match.

The procession itself has a date and an author. In 1935 the Marquis Folco de Baroncelli-Javon, a Provençal revivalist who had been enchanted by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show on its French tour thirty years earlier and had built his own mounted brotherhood of Camargue herdsmen partly in its image, negotiated with the archbishop of Aix and Arles for the Romani to walk Sara down to the water on 24 May, the day before the Marys’ boat goes out. Some accounts date the first sea procession to the following year. The clergy allowed it and never adopted it. An archbishop of Aix summarised the position with a straight face: the cult of Sara is immemorial, which is why he maintained it in its traditional form.

The claim that she is the Hindu goddess Kali under Christian paint is newer than the procession. It was put most forcefully by the Canadian Romani writer Ronald Lee, who argued in print in 2001 and 2002 that the worship of Kali and Durga had simply been transferred onto a saint who never existed. The case has real material in it. The Romani did come out of northwest India, their language is full of Sanskrit, Durga’s image is immersed in water every autumn at the close of her festival, and Sara’s face is black. Against it sits a plain linguistic fact, which is that kali in Romani means black, so the name may be describing the statue and nothing more. The historian who first took this folklore apart showed something else too: walking a saint into the Mediterranean is a Provençal habit, attested here in the seventeenth century when local people crossed the woods and the vines to kneel in the surf, belonging to the same family as the Rogation and Carnival processions, and practised at Fréjus, Monaco, Saint-Tropez and Collioure with saints who have nothing to do with India.

What she can do is narrow and specific, and it has never depended on the Church. She keeps the roads. She is asked for a safe journey, for a sick child, for the dead, and she is paid in wax and in cloth. Her limits are just as clear. She has no feast the Church grants her, no relic anyone will vouch for, no documented cult before about 1800, and no canonisation, which is why the chaplaincy eventually introduced a rival, a Notre-Dame des Gitans blessed at Lourdes in 1958 and crowned by Paul VI in 1965, and why many Catholic Romani will tell you that statue is their true patron. Pentecostal Romani, whose mission dates from the same decade, refuse Sara outright as idolatry, and the split runs through families still. A visitor in 1927 recorded the Languedoc women eyeing the crowd in the crypt and asking each other whether this Sara had ever been beatified, or even baptised, and concluding that she had been let into the lower parts of the church out of weakness, the way a dog is bedded at its master’s feet.

She holds anyway, because she is carried. Around four in the afternoon on 24 May the men lift her out of the candle-heat and take her on their shoulders through the streets and down to the shore, and the gardians ride their white horses into the water and stand there while she is walked out until the sea reaches her waist.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sara la Kali?

Sara la Kali, also called Sara e Kali or Saint Sarah, is the patron figure of the Romani people, venerated in the crypt of the church at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue in southern France. Legend attaches her to the boat that is said to have carried Mary Salome, Mary Jacobe and other early Christians to the Provençal coast. She is not recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church.

Is Sara la Kali really the Hindu goddess Kali?

That is a modern argument rather than an inherited tradition. It was pressed hardest by the Romani writer Ronald Lee, who claimed in 2001 and 2002 that the worship of Kali and Durga had been transferred onto a Christian figure who never existed, pointing to the Romani origin in northwest India and to the annual immersion of Durga’s image. The counter-argument is that kali simply means black in Romani, and that carrying a saint into the sea is an old Provençal custom found at Fréjus, Monaco and Saint-Tropez with unrelated saints.

When did the Romani pilgrimage to Sara begin?

The pilgrimage to the Marys at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is medieval, but Romani presence at it is first recorded in 1852, in a drawing published in the Paris magazine L’Illustration. The procession that carries Sara into the sea on 24 May was instituted in 1935, negotiated with the archbishop of Aix and Arles by the Marquis Folco de Baroncelli-Javon.

What does the statue of Sara look like?

She is a small dark-faced figure standing in the crypt, dressed to the lips in layers of gowns brought by pilgrims and surrounded by banks of burning candles. The priest who repaired her and took a mould of her in 1955 found her to be plaster rather than wood, not especially old, and assembled from a body and a head that match neither in scale nor in workmanship.

Why do Romani pilgrims light candles and touch objects to Sara?

Before the statue existed, pilgrims gathered around the plain casket said to hold her bones, and a Paris newspaper in 1905 described them pressing baskets, glasses, knives and bottles against it so that its power would pass into ordinary things. They burned the biggest candles they could buy and carried the stubs home as talismans. The same gestures continue today around the statue, which pilgrims kiss and touch on the face, hands and feet.

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