The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [2]
WHEN CAPITALISM was new and New England traders were beginning to change the world, Boston enjoyed a flourishing trade with Bilbao. John Adams ascribed the prosperity of the Basques to their love of freedom. In 1794, he wrote of the Basques, “While their neighbors have long since resigned all their pretensions into the hands of Kings and priests, this extraordinary people have preserved their ancient language, genius, laws, government and manners, without innovation, longer than any other nation of Europe.”
This is a people who have stubbornly fought for their unique concept of a nation without ever having a country of their own. To observe the Basques is to ask the question: What is a nation? The entire history of the world and especially of Europe has been one of redefining the nation. From pre-Indo-European tribes—all of whom have disappeared, except the Basques—Europe shifted to kingdoms, empires, republics, nation-states. Now there is to be a united Europe, touted as a new kind of entity, a new relationship between nations—though the sad appearance of a European flag and a European national anthem suggests that this new Europe could turn out to be just a larger nineteenth-century nationstate.
Europeans learned in the twentieth century to fear themselves and their passions. They distrust nationalism and religious belief because pride in nationality leads to dictatorship, war, disaster, and religion leads to fanaticism. Europe has become the most secular continent.
An anomaly in Europe, the Basques remain deeply religious and unabashedly nationalistic. But they are ready to join this united Europe, to seize its opportunities and work within it, just as they saw advantages to the Roman Empire, Ferdinand’s consolidation of Spain, and the French Revolution.
We live in an age of vanishing cultures, perhaps even vanishing nations. To be a Frenchman, to be an American, is a limited notion. Educated people do not practice local customs or eat local food. Products are flown around the world. We are losing diversity but gaining harmony. Those who resist this will be left behind by history, we are told.
But the Basques are determined to lose nothing that is theirs, while still embracing the times, cyberspace included. They have never been a quaint people and have managed to be neither backward nor assimilated. Their food, that great window into cultures, shows this. With an acknowledged genius for cooking, they pioneered the use of products from other parts of the world. But they always adapted them, made them Basque.
A central concept in Basque identity is belonging, not only to the Basque people but to a house, known in the Basque language as etxea. Etxea or echea is one of the most common roots of Basque surnames. Etxaberria means “new house,” Etxazarra means “old house,” Etxaguren is “the far side of the house,” Etxarren means “stone house.” There are dozens of these last names referring to ancestral rural houses. The name Javier comes from Xavier or Xabier, short for Etxaberria.
A house stands for a clan. Though most societies at some phase had clans, the Basques have preserved this notion because the Basques preserve almost everything. Each house has a tomb for the members of the house and an etxekandere, a spiritual head of the house, a woman who looks after blessings and prayers for all house members wherever they are, living or dead.
These houses, often facing east to greet the rising sun, with Basque symbols and the name of the house’s founder carved over the doorway, always have names, because the Basques believe that naming something proves its existence. Izena duen guzia omen da. That which has a name exists.
Etxea—a typical Basque farmhouse.
Even today, some Basques recall their origins by introducing themselves to a compatriot from the same region not by their family name, but by the name of their house, a building which may have vanished centuries ago. The founders may have vanished, the family name may disappear, but the name of the house endures. “But the house of my father will endure,” wrote the