The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [0]
BASQUE
HISTORY of
the WORLD
Mark Kurlansky
* * *
Contents
* * *
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction: The Island and the World
Part One
THE SURVIVAL OF EUSKAL HERRIA
The Basque Cake
1: The Basque Myth
2: The Basque Problem
3: The Basque Whale
4: The Basque Saint
5: The Basque Billy Goat
6: The Wealth of Non-Nations
Part Two
THE DAWN OF EUSKADI
The Basque Onomatopoeia
7: The Basque Beret
8: The Basque Ear
9: Gernika
10: The Potato Time
11: Speaking Christian
12: Eventually Night Falls
Part Three
EUSKADI ASKATUTA
Slippery Maketos
13: The Great Opportunity
14: Checks and Balances
15: Surviving Democracy
16: The Nation
Postscript: The Death of a Basque Pig
The Basque Thank You
Maps
Bibliography
Imprint
To Marian,
who makes life sparkle
* * *
Introduction: The Island and the World
The Basques are one of the unique people-islands to be found on the face of the earth, completely different in every sense from the peoples around them, and their language, surrounded by Aryan languages, forms an island somehow comparable to those peaks which still surface above the water in a flood zone.
—Lewy D’Abartiague, ON THE ORIGIN OF BASQUES, 1896
(A study made at the request of the
London Geographic Congress of 1895)
“These Basques are swell people,” Bill said.
—Ernest Hemingway, THE SUN ALSO RISES, 1926
* * *
THE FIRST TIME I heard the secret tongue, the ancient and forbidden language of the Basques, was in the Hotel Eskualduna in St.-Jean-de-Luz. It was the early 1970s, and Franco still ruled Spain like a 1930s dictator. I was interested in the Basques because I was a journalist and they were the only story, the only Spaniards visibly resisting Franco. But if they still spoke their language, they didn’t do it in front of me in Spanish Basqueland, where a few phrases of Basque could lead to an arrest. In the French part of Basqueland, in St.-Jean-de-Luz, people spoke Basque only in private, or whispered it, as though, only a few miles from the border, they feared it would be heard on the other side.
Much of St.-Jean-de-Luz, but especially the Hotel Eskualduna, seemed to function as a safe house for Basques from the other side. Spanish was almost as commonly heard as French. But at the little café on the ground floor of my hotel, the elderly hotel owner and her aging daughter whispered in Basque. When I walked into the room, they would smile pleasantly, offer me a suggestion for a restaurant or a scenic walk, and then resume talking in full voice in Spanish or French. As I opened the big glass-and-iron door to the street, I could hear them once again whispering in Basque.
The first time I went to St.-Jean-de-Luz, I arrived by train and was carrying heavy bags. I chose the Eskualduna because it was close to the train station. It was also inexpensive and housed in a fine, historic, stone building with a Basque flag over the doorway and antique wooden Basque furniture inside. I kept returning there because it seemed that something interesting was going on, though I never found out what. For that matter, it was years before I realized that the hotel had been a center for the Resistance during World War II and that my helpful, smiling hosts were decorated heroes who had been the bravest of people at one of mankind’s worst moments.
Everything seemed a little exciting and mysterious in Basqueland. With so much painful and dramatic history surrounding these people, I could never be sure who anyone was, and many Basques told astonishing stories about their experiences during the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Franco dictatorship. The silhouette of a long high mountain crest rises up behind St.-Jean-de-Luz where the sun sets, and this mountain, looking too rough to be French, is in Spain. I wrote in my notebook that the mountain, this Spanish border, looked like a “vaguely dangerous mystery.”
I don’t feel that way about Spain anymore. I now know that mountain as a benign nature preserve in Navarra near the