S’accabadora

Sardinia · The islands
Inland Sardinia: Barbagia and Gallura in the nineteenth-century attestations; Luras (province of Sassari) for the mallet in the Galluras museum

S’accabadora — the woman who, according to a Sardinian tradition told from 1826 onward as already extinct, gave death to the hopelessly dying with a pillow or a wooden mallet.

Variants and dialect names

accabadora, agabbadora, femina accabadora, accabadura; from accabare, «to finish», from Spanish acabar

What is told

The woman who, called by the family, gave death to the hopelessly dying, with a pillow or with a blow of a small wooden mallet to the nape. The first mention is by Alberto La Marmora, 1826: «women were specially charged with hastening the end of the dying; they were given the name of Accabadure, drawn from the verb Accabare (to finish)» — and he adds that this «remnant of barbarity» had been entirely lost «for about a hundred years». William Henry Smyth, 1828: in the Barbagia the hopelessly dying were throttled, «this act was performed by a hired woman called “accabadora,” or finisher», a custom abolished «sixty or seventy years ago». Antonio Bresciani, 1850, denies it: «if there was never in the Island the custom of hastening the death of the dying by smothering them with the pillows of the accabadore».

What it was forthe author’s reading

The figure gives shape to a practice that the sources record as a belief about the remote past, always extinct «sixty years» before whoever is writing: it is the typical structure of the ethnographic legend, which pushes back what cannot be seen. Its present success comes from giving a Sardinian and ancient name to a modern question, euthanasia; and inland Sardinia recognises itself in it as the place of a law of its own, earlier than the State’s.

Where it is attested

Alberto Della Marmora, Voyage en Sardaigne de 1819 à 1825, Paris, Delaforest, 1826. W. H. Smyth, Sketch of the Present State of the Island of Sardinia, London, 1828, p. 216. Antonio Bresciani, Dei costumi dell’isola di Sardegna, Naples, 1850, pp. 363-364. Vittorio Angius, entry «Bosa», in G. Casalis, Dizionario geografico… degli Stati di S. M. il Re di Sardegna, vol. II, Turin, 1834 (not checked against the text). Studies: Alessandro Bucarelli and Carlo Lubrano, Eutanasia ante litteram in Sardegna. Sa femmina accabbadora, Scuola Sarda, 2003; Dolores Turchi, «Ho visto agire s’accabadora», Iris, 2008; against: Italo Bussa, L’accabadora immaginaria. Una rottamazione del mito, Cagliari, Edizioni della Torre, 2015.

Caution

Grade C because no source describes a case that was seen: in 1826 the practice was already told as gone for a century, in 1828 for sixty or seventy years, and in 1850 an observer denied its existence. The two «documented cases» read everywhere — Luras 1929 and Orgosolo 1952 — go back to Bucarelli and Lubrano (2003): of the first it is said that the carabinieri and the Crown prosecutor of Tempio closed the file on humanitarian grounds, but no archival document has been published; the second is an oral account collected in 2003. Turchi’s testimony is that of a single person, aged ninety. The mallet displayed at the Galluras museum in Luras was found, according to those who display it, in 1993 in a niche of a dry-stone wall: it has no dating, and the mallet as an instrument appears in the literature on the accabadora only from 1991. Michela Murgia’s Accabadora (Einaudi, 2009, Campiello prize 2010) and Enrico Pau’s film (2015) are works of fiction and must not be used as sources.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.