The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky

Author:Mark Kurlansky
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Sociology, Travel, ebook, book, Politics, History
ISBN: 9780802713490
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 1999-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Official portrait from the swearing in of Aguirre as lehendakari. The oath, in Euskera, is printed on the portrait. (Sabino Arana Foundation, Bilbao)

Children who grew up in the 1930s in Basque Nationalist Party homes studied the Jemein book like a bible and revered the name Sabino Arana—not the troubling memory of the actual nineteenth-century man, but the Basque saint created in the twentieth century by Ceferino de Jemein and the Basque Nationalist Party. Anton Aurre, today president of the Sabino Arana Foundation, a key cultural wing of the modern Basque Nationalist Party, was born in 1933, in Aiangiz, a village near Guernica. Until Franco established his regime when Aurre was six years old, he lived in a completely Euskera-speaking world. “Sabino Arana was a constant reference. His photographs were around the house and there were wooden carvings of his likeness. As children, we use to do drawings copying photographs of him.”

A flowering of Euskera poetry in the 1930s was led by José María Aguirre, known as Lizardi, who died in 1933, and Esteban de Urquizu, known as Lauaxeta, who worked directly for the Basque Nationalist Party. Euskera theater, traditional dancing, and Basque choirs became popular entertainment. Basque sports, not only the always popular pelota but regattas, wagon lifting, sheep fighting, tug-of-war rope contests, wood chopping—the entire array of ancient rural Basque sports, once again drew enthusiastic crowds. The Basque Nationalist Party published its own sports magazine, which was widely read throughout Spain.

But the Basque government had come to power at the outbreak of a war, and one of the primary challenges facing the new government was to ensure public order through the creation of a Basque police force, known by the traditional Euskera name, the Ertzantza. Telesforo de Monzón, the new Basque minister of the interior, was in charge of the force. Monzón, an aristocrat from Guipúzcoa, the same age as Aguirre, was one of the most hated figures among Basque haters, especially the Fascists. He was well known because he had been a Basque Nationalist Party deputy in the Cortes. The Fascists hated the idea of a Basque nationalist aristocrat—someone whose last name was a Castilian title, who had enormous landholdings in Guipúzcoa and an elegant family estate in Vergara, as well as an unmistakably upper-class bearing and accent, and yet was a nationalist of strong conviction, author of patriotic songs. In Basque nationalist circles, he was known as a pleasant young man who loved arguing about affairs of state.

Monzón organized the police very quickly, recruiting from among pelota players, boxers, and other athletes, mostly from Basque Nationalist Party families. Monzón created Spain’s first motorized police force, under the direction of José María Pikazar, an aeronautic and electrical engineer who had studied police forces in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Pikazar recruited 400 men to do a kind of policing never seen before in Spain. Originally, they were to be issued patrol cars, but when the war made this impossible, many were supplied with fast motorcycles instead. Modeled after American police, they communicated by wireless radio.

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