The Festivities Museum

Museu Alcoià de la Festa (MAF)    Visit web of Museu Alcoià de la Festa MAF

  The Museum is almost a sanctuary where the material and sentimental inheritance of the festivities is preserved. Studying it carefully makes you understand the different aspects and elements that take part in the local festivities, distributed in its different rooms and sections:
   
 

ROOM I: Is a kind of introduction, with a selection of paintings and drawings showing different aspects of the festivities. A glass case shows an example of the most important garments' desings: those of the captains and their second lieutenants, both Moors and Christians, and also the one of the little boy that, annually ellected to represent the saint patron, receives the name of Sant Jordiet (little saint George).
 

Saint George's iconography occupies an important place in the room, as he is the one to honour with the festivities. In other glass cases there are weapons, old brochures and magazines, medals and stamps, all of them about the festivities and the saint patron. There are also gunpowder weapons that are used to simulate the fight in the battle called "Alardo". Besides, there are a lot of documents, some of them with the concession of the honourific title of "Marqués de San Jorge" (Marquis of saint George) to Mr. Miguel Payá Pérez, a gift to the Museum from his grandson Mr. Miguel Payá Catalá.

ROOM II: dedicated exclusively to the garments worn by "Sant Jordiet", the little boys who were saint George in the festivities in the past years. One of the exhibition shows the evolution of the garments designs during the last seventy years. A wall in the room has eight paintings and a painting in glazed tiles, all of them creations of local artists, that show the actual tendencies and their interpretation of saint George nowadays.

       
ROOM III: an exhibition of the saint different iconography and a complete photographs collection (from 1980 until now), from the kids that had been "sant Jordiet".

ROOM IV: in the middle of the room you can find the oldest designs of the garments worn by the captains and second liutenants preserved until now. On the walls, the old photographs with its artistic frames of the men that have represented the captains and liutenants since the XIX century.
   

         


ROOMS V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X: continuing the exhibition that begun in the previous one, this series of rooms show the garments in their chronological order, although there are some of them having a monographic section, so as the room number V, showing some elements dedicated to the celebration of the VI centenary (1876). Room number VI has a collection of "Fianzas", a symbolic quantity of 50 pesetas given by the "filaes" in charge to represent the second liutenant, so as to commit themselves, in a symbolic way, to represent the captain Moor or Christian in the following year festivities.
Rooms number VII, VIII and XIX show the old Moors and Christians festivities posters, from which stands out the oldest one preserved, from 1876. Finally, Room number X is dedicated to the festivities music, showing photos, oil paintings, and musical notations from local composers, being one of them the festivities hymn composed by Gonzalo Barrachina Sellés, and published in the local newspaper "Heraldo de Alcoi" in 1917.