Baly Tower
Historic village Pantano and its territory exude ancient vestiges without however officially denouncing anything. This happens as a result of a complex historical process that has crossed this territory over the centuries to the point of causing it, due to a "preservation instinct", to lose its memory and erase the testimonies of a "past" to be forgotten, if not even denied in order to survive in the face of the dominant religious culture of the time.
The “Baly” Tower is located in this context. In 1396 the “dayan kelay” that is, the universal judge of all the Jewish communities of Sicily. A position created by the Aragonese crown to have direct control over the flourishing activities of the Jewish communities. The "dayan kelay", in documents it is often reported with the term "dienchelele”, had the power to appoint the administrators of the individual Giudecche with the discretion to delegate his own vicars in places where such a figure was missing.
For this reason, the figures of the "Proti" arose who in turn delegated, in the small communities, to the "Baly" who exercised justice and exacted taxes, a judge of the Jewish community, with the task of direct control over the rich economic and legal bodies of the village as well as a single interlocutor on the relevant territories.
Centuries have passed since then, unaware generations have followed one another in the area. But a miracle happened, the "Baly" tower has maintained, despite the loss of memory and the insults of time, its identity, perhaps, absurdly, safeguarded precisely because it is "protected" from abandonment and the impossibility of transformation ( due to the financial constraints of those communities that had succeeded one another after the opulence and awareness experienced in the times of Balioto), a unique reality has come down to us of which it is possible to reinterpret the way of living and operating of a "cultured" community which operated on this site, integrated into an environment and a territory, managing to exploit all the enormous potential it offered but without ever disturbing its balance, to the point that what was achieved up to the beginning of the 1600s has surpassed the ravages of time and repeated natural disasters to become appreciated today.
In fact, the balance between nature and the sustainable needs of the community was the secret of this small, wise reality capable of founding an anthropic settlement so in harmony with the places that after centuries of economic-cultural decline and decades of total physical abandonment it is still structurally intact. in its material presence with its "tower" capable of overcoming time and showing itself today, to those who observe it, as evidence to affirm all that "knowledge" possessed by those who wisely built it.
Source: Text provided by Orazio Bisazza
Card insertion: Ignazio Caloggero
Information contributions: Web
Photo: Provided by Orazio Bisazza
Dedicated web area of La Sicilia in Rete: Borgo Pantano online
