Sicilians Foresee End Of Ancient Tuna Ritualff

An ancient tuna-killing ritual off Sicily is facing extinction because of a “complete absence” of the fish, for which local fishermen blame Japanese “factory ships”.

The springtime ritual, the mattanza (literally “the slaughter”), dates back thousands of years and normally attracts tourists and gourmets to the small island of Favignana and the fishing village of Bonagia, near Trapani, on Sicily’s west coast. For centuries fishermen here have driven the 400kg (880lb) bluefin tuna fish through a series of channels into a maze of net traps, where they are harpooned. The spectacle, in which the sea turns red with blood, not only provides hundreds of Sicilians with a living but also is seen as a symbol of man’s long- standing “struggle with the elements” in the Mediterranean.

Tuna was a delicacy prized by the Romans, who made it into a paste called muria. Tuna fishing on Favignana was described by Homer in The Odyssey.

A mainstay of the Sicilian economy since the Middle Ages, the spring slaughter was vividly reported three years ago by Theresa Maggio, the American writer, in her book Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily. Maggio, who is of Sicilian origin, lived alongside the fishermen of Favignana to record an event of “primal energy, beauty and suffering, all in a tiny square of  sea”.

Last week she said that the demise of the mattanza was tragic. “The truth is that tuna fishing in the Mediterranean has long been in decline and may no longer be viable even as a tourist attraction, let alone as a business,” she said. “It is kept going only by Italian government subsidies. It has been doomed since high-intensity factory fishing got under way in earnest about 30 years ago.”

The mattanza normally takes place this month as shoals of tuna pass through the Straits of Gibraltar to spawn in the Mediterranean. They swim close to the Moroccan coast before reaching the Aegadian Islands off Sicily, where fishing crews, headed by a rais, from the Arabic word for a chieftain, wait with huge nets, which they call “chambers of death”.

Salvatore Spataro, the rais of Bonagia, said yesterday that the traps were empty  â€œfor the first time anyone can remember. We are waiting for the tuna, but they haven’t come.” He said that there was also no sign of the swordfish that normally swim alongside the tuna. That last year they had caught 400 tuna, “but this year there is nothing at all . . .We are facing disaster.”

La Repubblica newspaper said that the main blame lay with Japanese factory ships in the Atlantic, which “scoop up everything out of the sea using sonars and working 24 hours a day in shifts. This is not fishing, it is a factory production line and after a quarter of a century it has left the Mediterranean impoverished… This is a fish war, and our fishermen must now realise that they lost it a long time ago.”

Gioacchino Cataldo, the rais at Favignana, said that two centuries ago Sicily boasted 100 tuna-fishing complexes, each with its own processing plants, net storage, drying depots and chapel. “A tradition is now dying,” he said.

             Fishermen on the Island of Favignana haul in a tuna in May 2000