Join the San Pedro House of Culture in celebrating "El dia de la Cruz" on May 3rd @ 7:00 pm.
The Feast of the Holy Cross...

The feast of the Holy Cruz is one of the important symbols in the Catholic religion as it represents the Trinity: God, the Father, God, the Son, and God, the Holy Spirit; as well as it was on the cross where Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died.

The legend is that Emperor Constantine I, in the sixth year of his reign, confronted the barbarians on the banks of the Danube, in a battle where victory was believed to be impossible because of the great size of the enemy army. One night, Constantine had a vision of a cross in the sky and by it the words "In hoc signo vincis" (With this sign, you shall be victorious). The emperor had a cross made and put it at the front of his army, which won an easy victory over the enemy multitude.

On returning to the city and learning the significance of the cross, Constantine was baptized as a Christian and gave orders to construct Christian churches. He sent his mother, Saint Helena, to Jerusalem in search of the True Cross, the cross on which Jesus died. Once there, Helena summoned the wisest priests to aid in her attempt to find the cross. On Calvary Hill, traditionally considered the site of Jesus's crucifixion, she found three bloody logs hidden. In order to discover which one was the True Cross, she placed the logs one by one over sick people, and even dead people, who were cured or resuscitated at the touch of the True Cross. The veneration of the True Cross, and the use of pieces of the True Cross as relics, begins at this time. Santa Helena died praying for all believers in Christ to celebrate the commemoration of the day the Cross was found.

The Maya Cross

The Maya Cross’s symbolic identity is that of supernatural entities, such as Itzamná and Chaak; as well as ancestral entities, trees, corn stalks, and other plants which abound in the Mayaab, the land of the Maya.

Maya Crosses often have an overhead semi-circle of flowers. Maya crosses are often painted a blue-green hue, which signifies centrality, and are referred to as "ya’ as che’ "--’green tree’ and "kuxa’an" –alive. The Maya belief that proclamations of these crosses come from the "divine" voice of "hahal ku," the true Maya god of the Macehual. Interestingly, this Maya God, which communicates through the different crosses, is sometimes literally stated as being Itzamná, the god of creation.

Green crosses are not only related to maize but to the Chaak’ob, Maya rain deity, who bring the fields to life with their precious rain. Indeed, placed in front of some of these green crosses are conch shells with which the crosses trumpet a call to the Chaak’ob to summon them forth from the “aktuns” or caves in order to bring rain. The clothing of the cross is not a "huipil" but a special cloth called a "sudario," a death shroud. The Maya belief that "the cross grows from the sudario and the earth" and all sudarios are marked by having a cleft like aperture from which the cross emerges. The crosses are often regarded as living beings and as plant-like.

In 1850, Jose Maria Barrera, driven from his Yucatán pueblo during the Caste War of Yucatan, discovered a cross carved into a tree at a small cenote called Lom Ha (Cleft Spring). The cross bore a resemblance to the Maya tree of life, La Ceiba, and a new religion formed around it, the cult of the speaking cross.