Palm Sunday, or locally, Cvitnica, is a custom where Christians throughout the world are celebrating Jesus’s coming to Jerusalem. It’s celebrated on the last Sunday before Easter and the Holy Week. Townspeople from Betina are celebrating it too. Before the Sunday it’s important to cutt down the right olive branches so they can be decorated as a palm. It’s never easy to select the proper branches between different types of olives in the groves. There is a local type of olive – duška, with long leaves easy to knit in palms. There are two different palms that can be made in Betina – a male one and a female palm. A male palm is made out of a single branch, while the female palm is more complex with three separate branches being connected at the top.
Decorated olive palms are then blessed at the Palm Sunday Holy Mass in the Church. After the blessing, they were usually placed behind the picture of a saint and being kept like that till the next Palm Sunday.
