Dressed in black, she had the task of putting an end to the suffering of the dying or terminally ill. Until the early twentieth century it was present in the oral tradition of Sardinia and the elusive and enigmatic myth still persists today. She is "s'acabbadora", a female figure who, with a feeble gesture on the border between sacredness and taboo, life and death, reflects the choices of a legalized euthanasia of the past, to put an end to now extreme suffering.
On Saturday, the image of this woman will cross the gates of the Mariposa de cardu Garden at 6.30 pm through the book "Accabbadora, myth and reality" by Aldo Cinus, Roberto Demontis, Augusto Marini and Mariano Staffa. We have always wondered whether this, protected by silence within the ancient Sardinian communities, ever really existed. Even if the old women and men especially from the Sardinian hinterland in their stories speak of women who moved in the darkness to put an end to long and painful agonies.
The book therefore talks about this figure and was born from a discovery made by the authors with the collaboration of Gianfranco Tore, professor of Modern History at the University of Cagliari of the instruments used by Accabbadora. At the moment it is the most complete and includes: a rustic olive hammer, a wooden chisel, called "sa mercy", a sheet of stamped paper with nine names of people, about twenty sheets of ecclesiastical newspaper, a rosary, some stamps stamp from the 1920s and a contemporary copper coin. Francesca Melis
