Accettura

Accettura lies between the Matera hills and the park's western edge, inside the Parco Regionale Gallipoli Cognato e Piccole Dolomiti Lucane, a protected area it shares with Pietrapertosa and Castelmezzano next door. The village's own calendar runs on a separate rhythm: from the octave of Easter to Pentecost, the year builds toward the marriage of two trees. The oak, u' Masc', comes down from the forest above the village on Ascension Day; the holly, u' Cima, is cut in the park forest the Sunday after. Yoked oxen drag both trunks into the village, where they are joined and raised as one pole in the main piazza, thirty-five meters high. Ethnographers read the rite as a Lombard arboreal cult laid over the newer cult of the patron saint, the two now inseparable in practice though centuries apart in origin.

For the rest of the year the village returns to its ordinary size and quiet, a small stone settlement whose one loud week of the year is also its oldest.