Saints, Sardines, and the Long Light of June

On the evening of 12 June, in the Alfama, you can smell Lisbon before you see it. The whole hill smells of burning oil and salt and basil, of pine charcoal that has been alight too long, of beer warming in plastic cups. The smoke is everywhere — drifting up the narrow lanes, hanging in the laundry strung between the windows, settling into the stones. By the time you have climbed three flights of street, you have, in some practical sense, already eaten.

This is the eve of Santo António, and Lisbon is, for one night, an enormous outdoor sardine restaurant.

The festa proper begins on the 13th, but the cooking begins the night before, because something on the order of thirteen million sardines will be eaten across Portugal during the festival period, and you cannot grill thirteen million sardines in a single day. So the small portable grills appear on every street corner, the men with tongs and the women with paper plates, the queues that move slowly because everyone knows everyone else. The sardine is served on a slice of broa, the dense Portuguese cornbread, which catches the oil as it drips and becomes, by the end of the night, the best part of the meal. You eat it with your fingers. There is no other way.

The Portuguese have made an entire month out of this. Santo António is the 13th, São João is the 24th, São Pedro is the 29th, and the whole stretch is known collectively as the festas dos santos populares — the festivals of the popular saints. Each city has its preferred one. Lisbon belongs to Santo António. Porto belongs to São João, and conducts itself with a particular northern abandon: bonfires in every square, balões — small hot-air paper lanterns sent up into the sky — and, most peculiarly, plastic hammers, with which the entire population spends the night bopping one another on the head. There is no good explanation for the hammers. They replaced an older tradition of hitting strangers with leeks, which is presumably what plastic hammers are an improvement on.

In both cities, you eat sardines.

In Porto, you also eat caldo verde — the famous shredded-kale and potato soup — and bifanas, the thin pork sandwiches, and you drink a small green Vinho Verde that pairs with the smoke in a way that no oenologist would have predicted but which works perfectly. You also, if you are observant, see manjericos: tiny pots of basil sold in their thousands, given as small gifts from one person to another, each one stuck with a paper carnation and a verse of bad rhyming love poetry. The basil is not to be eaten. The basil is the festival in miniature. You take it home and look at it for two weeks and then it dies, and the year moves on.

Move east along the Mediterranean and the saints change names but not, particularly, their habits.

In Spain, the night of 23 June is San Juan, the eve of Saint John the Baptist, and the country lights itself on fire. In Alicante and across the Valencian coast there are hogueras, enormous papier-mâché monuments built for the year and burned at midnight in an event so spectacular and so well organised that it has its own UNESCO inscription. In Catalonia it is Sant Joan, eaten with a slab of coca de Sant Joan — a flat sweet brioche studded with candied fruit and pine nuts — drunk with cava. In Galicia the night of San Juan is the night of the queimada: aguardiente set alight in a clay bowl with sugar and citrus peel, stirred with a ladle while someone reads aloud an old incantation against witches.

But on the beaches — and Spain has a great deal of beach — the food is, again, sardines. Sardinadas are set up the length of the Mediterranean and Cantabrian coasts. Long charcoal trenches are dug into the sand, sardines threaded onto canes in groups of six, the canes stuck into the sand at an angle, and the fat drips down into the fire and produces the smoke that the whole evening smells of by ten o'clock. Bonfires further down the beach. Bottles in the sand. Young people running into the dark sea at midnight, which is the San Juan tradition that absolutely everyone agrees on regardless of region: at midnight you go into the water, and whatever needs to be left behind from the year, you leave there.

Cross another border. In Italy, the night of 23 June is San Giovanni, and the food logic moves slightly inland and downward — to snails. In Rome there is an old, increasingly rare tradition of eating lumache on the night of San Giovanni in the streets around the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, washed down with strong red wine; the snails are said to symbolise the horns of discord, buried by their consumption. In Florence, San Giovanni is the patron of the city, and the day is marked with the calcio storico — a brutal sort of medieval football played on a sand-covered Piazza Santa Croce — and fireworks over the Arno. The food is whatever is good and cheap and grillable: bistecca, salsiccia, trippa, focaccia. The fish drops out of the equation here, but the smoke and the late-light public eating are exactly the same.

And then, further north, the same evening — almost the same evening — produces something that looks, on the surface, like a different feast altogether.

The Swedes call it Midsommar and hold it on the Friday closest to the solstice. The table is white linen, not paper plates; the fish is herring, not sardines, in six varieties of pickle — mustard, dill, onion, schnapps-cured, sherry-cured, the famous sill i senapssås. There are new potatoes boiled with dill, sour cream, crispbread, beer, and small glasses of snaps drunk to songs that get less coherent as the bottle gets lighter. Strawberries and cream for pudding. Outside, a maypole — although the maypole is a midsummer one, not a May Day one, because Sweden in May is still too cold to dance around anything outdoors.

In Finland it is Juhannus, and the food is sausage and beer cooked beside a kokko bonfire on a lakeside. In Denmark it is Sankt Hans Aften, with bonfires and a small witch effigy on top, sent symbolically off to the Brocken. In Estonia and Latvia, Jaanipäev and Jāņi — bonfires, sour cheese with caraway, dark bread, beer, and entire nights of staying awake because the sun barely sets and it would be a waste of the light not to.

Stand back from all of this and the pattern is uncomfortably clear.

Across roughly two thousand miles of Europe — from the mouth of the Tagus to the Gulf of Finland — there is a night, somewhere between the 13th and the 29th of June, on which an enormous number of unrelated people light a fire outdoors, grill an oily fish, drink a strong clear drink, and stay up much too late. The saints' names change. The fish changes — sardine becomes herring, more or less along the line where the sardine fishery ends. The bread changes. The drink changes from Vinho Verde to cava to snaps to viin. But the underlying grammar — fire, fat-fish, herb, alcohol, outdoor, late — does not change at all.

It is not particularly difficult to see why. The fish are in their best condition at this time of year, full of summer oil. The herbs are at their peak. The night is short enough to make staying up feel like a small triumph rather than a punishment. And the impulse to light a fire on the longest day of the year is older than any of the religions that later attached their names to it. Saint John the Baptist's day, 24 June, falls almost exactly six months before Christmas, which is theologically convenient and astronomically not a coincidence at all. The summer solstice was already burning long before there was a Baptist to anchor it to.

What I find moving about this, every year, is that these celebrations have remained obstinately local. The hammers in Porto are not the hammers in Helsinki. The herring in Stockholm is not the sardine in Lisbon. Nobody has homogenised this; nobody has merged it into a single pan-European Solstice Brand. Each country keeps its own version, with its own saint and its own fish, in the same way that each Portuguese street has its own grill and its own slightly different arrangement of the basil pot. The deep grammar is shared. The surface is fiercely particular.

And then, somewhere around half past one in the morning, the smoke thins out, the fires burn lower, the last sardine is eaten, the last glass of snaps poured, and the longest day of the year begins, very gently, to turn into the shortest journey back into the dark.