LA PAZ – Bolivia celebrated on Thursday the Alasita festival, dedicated to the dwarf Andean deity Ekeko, an event that appears on the UN Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The main activity was in La Paz, the cradle of the tradition, with Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera, Culture Minister Wilma Alanoca and municipal authorities in attendance.

“Today we are sharing Alasita with the whole world, because we are also celebrating the Alasita in 20 other countries,” Alanoca told EFE during a stroll through the fair.

Alasita – the word means “Buy me!” in Aymara, the country’s main indigenous language – is observed annually on Jan. 24, when followers of the tradition purchase a miniature artifact related to money, food, vehicles, titles to property and other material goods.

Often, the purchaser will then take the miniature artifact to an Andean shaman or to a Catholic church to have the object blessed.

Those who come to the fair are motivated by faith, Aymara shaman Raul Mayta told EFE.

“It is faith that commands them,” he said.

Mayta was among a large contingent of shamans standing at the feet of a large statue of Ekeko statue, the main Andean deity of abundance and prosperity, in the heart of La Paz’s Central Urban Park.

Ekeko is rendered as a short, chubby, pale-eyed man of mixed indigenous and European ancestry.

Hanging from his body are sacks full of goods, symbolic of the wealth possession of the figure is supposed to ensure.

Among Bolivia’s rural indigenous peoples, the festival devoted to the diminutive deity was aimed at securing rich harvests, but since moving to the city, Ekeko’s adherents now look to him to provide goods, money, good luck, success and power, all of which are symbolized in the figures sold by the craftspeople at the Alasita Fair.

Elizabeth, a woman who came for Alasita from the central region of Cochabamba, told EFE that she has faith in Ekeko and bought miniature objects that symbolize money and school diplomas for her children.