PERU | Saturday, 6 July 2013 | Views [622] | Comments [2] | View Larger Image
A group of men struggle under the weight of a saints' effigy as they carry it through the streets of Cusco and around the Plaza de Armas, during the festival of Corpus Christi. They will do this all day and into the night when they will store the effegies until morning in La Catedral, a Spanish colonial cathedral, which you can see behind them. Celebrated exactly nine weeks after Easter, it is a ritual co-opted by the Spanish in the 16th Century to Catholicize the Incan people. The effigies are treated as living beings in a similar way as the Inca paraded their ancestors' mummies around that same plaza centuries before.
Tags: travel photography scholarship 2013
