Porto is one of the typical destinations for a vacation or tourist visit in Portugal. However, for those who are already familiar with the city or seek something beyond the usual, a trip to Póvoa de Varzim is highly recommended. This town, located about 30 kilometers away, boasts two particularly special spots not to be missed: the 18th-century Igreja Matriz and Igreja da Lapa. What makes these temples interesting is not so much the rococo altarpiece of the former or the integrated lighthouse of the latter but rather certain decorative elements visible on their floors, walls, and portals: the so-called Siglas poveiras (Povoa signs), a proto-writing system whose similarity to Viking runes has given rise to the intriguing hypothesis of a Scandinavian origin.

Póvoa de Varzim originated from Villa Euracini, an ancient Roman settlement that was itself preceded by a castro, Civitate do Terroso. During the Middle Ages, it grew thanks to the royal charters granted by Kings Denis I and Manuel I in 1308 and 1514, respectively, becoming a póvoa or town. However, it was fishing that truly drove its development, to the point that by the 18th century, it had become the country’s main fishing port. Later, tourism in the late 19th century was drawn to its expansive beaches and the railway connection to Porto, which spurred the growth of the food and textile industries.

Before this, starting in the 9th century, when the region was still part of the first County of Portugal founded by Vimara Peres, Viking fishermen from Brittany began to settle there, gradually forming a colony. This occurred a century before the waves of Norman invasions that ravaged the Iberian Northwest. This cultural legacy is evident in elements such as the lancha poveira, a type of traditional local boat whose construction features and appearance (up to 14 meters in length, wide hull, about 30 rowers) align with Scandinavian vessels like the drakkar or the knörr.

Siglas poveiras
Street plaque decorated with Siglas poveiras. Credit: Joseolgon / Wikimedia Commons

As mentioned earlier, another legacy is that of the Siglas poveiras or Povoa signs, a communication system using symbols very similar to Nordic runes, which ethnologists such as António dos Santos Graça, historians like Paulo de Sosa Pinto, and anthropologists such as Octávio Lixa Felgueiras attribute to Viking origins. In 1980, historian and priest João Francisco Marques organized an exhibition on the subject at the Museu Municipal de Etnografia e História de Póvoa de Varzim, which received an international award and inspired the initiative to adorn nearly three hundred street name plaques with the siglas.

It should be noted that Póvoa de Varzim is not the only place where these marks can be found. They are also present in other parts of the Minho region, such as the temples of Senhora da Abadia and São Bento da Porta Aberta (in Terras de Bouro), São Torcato (in Guimarães), Senhora da Guia (in Vila do Conde), Nossa Senhora da Bonança (Esposende), and the Capela de Santa Cruz (in Balazar). Some can even be found outside Portugal, such as in the castro of Santa Tecla in neighboring Guarda (Galicia, Spain). These marks were probably carried by poveiro fishermen as promessas de campanha (in veneration of local saints) or as passage documents (marking the place for those who came later).

This is why most of these marks are found in religious settings. However, it is worth noting that in other European countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, the British Isles, the Netherlands, France, Germany, northern Italy, and Slavic countries), similar house marks exist. These ideograms, composed of lines and angles, represented clans, families, or guilds. They were used to mark homes, livestock, tools, graves, boundaries, and other objects, as well as to seal documents, serving as a form of visual identification in a time of widespread illiteracy.

Siglas poveiras
General view of the castro of Santa Tecla, in Galicia (Spain). Credit: Vicenç Valcárcel Pérez / Wikimedia Commons

Comparable to the tamgas of Eurasian nomads, in Scandinavian countries these marks are known as bomärken. Given their similarity to runes and Siglas poveiras, they are thought to have been their origin, brought over by those Viking settlers.

In general, northern Portuguese fishermen were illiterate, so using easily recognizable monograms could be incredibly useful, especially on their boats (painted on the hulls), wooden barracks (carved with knives), graves, and account books. For them, Siglas poveiras were almost equivalent to a form of writing—rudimentary but effective.

As mentioned earlier, fishing became increasingly important in Póvoa de Varzim. Distinguishing one’s own gear and nets from others’, as well as the captured fish, must have been a necessity. This peculiar non-verbal communication system met this need and, over time, became more widespread while retaining its ease of memorization. It also remained exclusively tied to the fishing world, which is why it did not appear outside it. Later, with the spread of education in the 20th century, it eventually faded into obscurity.

Siglas poveiras
Pavement of a street in mosaic with Siglas poveiras. Credit: PedroPVZ / Wikimedia Commons

Each boat had its own symbol or emblem, which could be used by all its crew members. If one of them left the crew to join another, they would also change their symbol. However, this was separate from their personal family sign, which they continued to use on their personal belongings aboard the ship. Additionally, the catch could belong to a sardinheiro or a lanchão, and it was the wife of each fisherman who marked the fish with his symbol. In this case, the mark was not painted or carved with a knife but made with a series of blows that formed the marcas de peixe.

The effectiveness of the poveira insignias lay in the fact that there were thousands of symbols, but no grammar or reading system per se—they did not represent words or sounds. The basis of their use was memorization and visual recognition, somewhat similar to the Romanesque reliefs found on cathedral façades.

The number of symbols expanded over time because each poveiro engraved his own on the sacristy table of the church when he married and founded a new family (as seen in the mentioned Igreja Matriz and Igreja de Lapa). Endogamy did the rest.

Siglas poveiras
An example of piques: from left to right, we see the signs of the father, first son, second son, third son, and the heir. Credit: PedroPVZ / Wikimedia Commons

Regarding family symbols or anagrams, the signs were passed down from generation to generation, although with a striking detail: they were not inherited by the eldest son but by the youngest. This echoes Danish and British traditions, where the youngest child inherited because they were of an appropriate age to care for their aging parents, while the eldest would likely have already started their own family. Thus, this child would inherit the boat and fishing gear, being the only one with the right to use the insignia.

This does not mean that the others were entirely excluded. They could also use it but with small variations, called piques: added strokes that increased in number according to birth order, making the final result slightly different from the original. These strokes could be lines, stars, bars, crosses, and so on. As this process repeated, the family tree of insignias expanded through diversification. Studies on hundreds of signs and piques have identified eighty-four original families.

This type of anagram is known as marca-brasão (heraldic mark), and in account books, they were complemented with other symbols representing numbers (prices, wages, etc.). However, according to Lixa Filgueiras, there was a second, less common type of poveira sign—less than half—that was not associated with ownership but had religious and magical purposes, such as the sanselimão (a five-pointed star). These appeared in places of worship, such as churches, chapels, and funerary tombstones. Good examples include the insignias in the aforementioned temples or the lost door of the hermitage built in the Pontevedra hillfort of Santa Tecla, where fishermen performed rituals to ensure favorable winds.

Siglas poveiras
Basic poveira signs from which most others derive. Credit: PedroPVZ / Wikimedia Commons

Today, only a few hundred poveira signs remain, collected by António de Santos Graça in his book Epopeia dos Humildes, published in 1952. However, there were once many more symbols; just the table in the Church of Mercy had thousands engraved from marriages, but these were lost when the building was demolished. If Lixa Filgueiras’ hypothesis of their Norman Viking origin is correct, they were generated along with their piques over about ten centuries. This Portuguese anthropologist compared them to Nordic runes, finding that some were exactly identical.

Most of the signs were ideographically inspired by everyday objects. For instance, the cruzeiro in the cemetery of Póvoa de Varzim inspired the padrão (standard), just as the Ala-Arriba (an expression sung by people when pulling boats from the water to the sand) inspired the coice (a line with an oblique one representing the boat in that situation), the arpão (harpoon, depicted as a vertical arrow), the sarilho (a tool for winding skeins of wool or hemp represented by a potent cross), the lanchinha (an inverted triangle symbolizing a boat), and others.

Additionally, there is a notable similarity between poveira signs and the house marks from the Danish region of Funen (Denmark’s third-largest island), preserved in the National Museum of Copenhagen, with which they also seem to share a chronological parallel. However, from the 20th century onward, the Latin alphabet occasionally began to be introduced, sometimes complementing the symbols as piques and other times replacing them entirely. Today, these signs survive more as a cultural vestige.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on January 7, 2025: Siglas poveiras, la insólita proto-escritura legada por vikingos a pescadores portugueses

SOURCES

A. Santos Graça, O poveiro. Usos, costumes, tradições, lendas

Rafael Arnoni y Susana Barreto, Estudo comparativo entre as siglas poveiras de Póvoa de Varzim/Portugal e as marcas de gado do sertão nordestino/Brasil: aproximações e distinções na construção dos padrões gráficos e transmissão hereditária

Sam William Blake, Siglas poveiras

Ricardo Braz Frade, Siglas Poveiras

Wikipedia, Siglas poveiras

  • Share on:

Discover more from LBV Magazine English Edition

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.

Follow LBV Magazine on Google News