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By Root 789 0

the Basque language. Even the Fueros of the Middle Ages had been written in Spanish, and Foral administration had encouraged the use of the Castilian language as a sign of culture and learning. But in 1936, the Basque Renaissance was in its sixtieth year. Ikastolas were well supplied with textbooks and dictionaries. In 1918, the Basque Academy of Language had been founded, and it was working on defining a standard Euskera from its eight spoken dialects. The new government’s cultural policy pursued what was called the “Sabinian school of Bascology,” following the linguistic ideas of Arana, which rejected Latin words and even Latin letters. C was changed to k, ch to tx, v to b, and s to z.

The Association of Basque Schools was formed with parallel organizations for Basque teachers and for Basque students. Publishing houses were established for nationalist books. In 1935, the Basque Nationalist Party published for the Juventud Vasco de Bilbao, the youth group headed by Aguirre, an official biography of Sabino Arana. The author, Ceferino de Jemein, presented in biblical Spanish the life of a saint. The darker sides of Sabino were carefully airbrushed. The book of some 200 pages spared no expense, from its green, red, gold, and chocolate Art Deco endpapers, to hundreds of photographs, etchings, and color reproductions of old Carlists, including several portraits of Tomás Zumalacárregui, numerous photographs of Carlist units in Vizcaya during the second war, documents and photos of Arana’s life, a reproduction of Sabino and Luis’s rough design for the ikurriña, and ending with 1930s photographs of rallies in support of the Basque autonomy statute.

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