Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  Daniel Landart, born in 1945, the son of Labourdine farmers, saw the disintegration of Euskera in his family. “During World War I my grandfather went to war and wrote my grandmother in Basque. During World War II my father was deported to a German labor camp and wrote my mother in French. They always spoke in Basque, but they wrote in French.”

  Having grown up before television, no one spoke anything but Euskera in Landart’s home. But the language was forbidden in school. Some teachers let children speak Euskera during recess, but others were more strict. One teacher would force the student, caught in the act of speaking Euskera, to stand by the door holding a broom until he could catch someone else speaking it. The newly betrayed Euskaldun would then be given the broom until he caught someone else. The one holding the broom at the end of the class had to write fifty times, “I will not speak Basque.”

  Landart said, “This created an atmosphere of denunciation and fear among us. The one who was denounced remained angry at the denouncer for life. It divided us.”

  As a teenager, Landart could speak Basque, but he could only read and write in French, the language of his education. At sixteen, he began to teach himself to read in his mother tongue, starting with French Basque writers, because the dialect was easiest for him. In time, he was writing in Euskera. He wrote a sixty-four-page book of poetry and short stories and published 1,000 copies at his own expense. The 300 copies he sold in local markets paid the cost of publication, and the rest he gave away. Some of the poems have since become popular songs. He later wrote a novel and several plays, but the book for which he is best known is Aihen Ahula, (Weak Root), an autobiographical account of his search for his own culture. It is a search that many French Basques have been undertaking.

  THE PERCENTAGE OF Basques throughout the seven provinces who speak Euskera depends on whose definition of a Basque is used. The official definition is someone residing in Basqueland. The Basque government considers any citizen of its three-province region to be a Basque. But polls have shown that Basques have wide disagreement on the definition. Juan San Martin of the Basque Academy of Language said, “This is not a relevant debate in the Basque language. It only speaks of Basque speakers. Someone with a Basque name from Basque country who does not speak Basque is a Basque, but he is not an Euskaldun. And in Basque culture, being Basque is not significant. It can’t even be said.”

  Taking into account the entire population gives little Soule, which has attracted few outsiders and, for that matter, has few locals, the highest percentage of Basque speakers, and gives Labourd, where retired Parisians have taken up residence by the beach, and Navarra, where half the province is no longer culturally Basque, the lowest ratios of Basque speakers. In all seven provinces, retirees and Castilians included, 37 percent of people speak some Euskera, but only 25 percent are completely fluent. This would mean that slightly more than 600,000 people speak fluent Euskera, though more than 800,000 speak some Euskera. Among that additional 200,000 are many people who are in the process of learning the language.

  But what is of deep concern is that while the percentage of Euskera speakers is dramatically rising on the Spanish side, it is declining on the French side. Basques hold their territory by language, and there is a risk of completely losing the French Basque provinces. This would be the first significant loss of Basque territory since the late Roman Empire.

  Until the abolition of the Fueros, Euskera was surviving far better under Spanish rule than under the French. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Hugo found the Basque language to be almost a religion, it was spoken by only about one-third of the population in the French provinces where he was visiting, whereas in 1867, more than 96 percent of the residents of Guipúzcoa spoke Basque.

  In Spanish Basqueland, the number of Basque speakers declined under Franco and has risen to twentieth-century heights since his death. Despite the seventy commandos and the 15,000 police, this is one of the best moments Spanish Basques have ever had. Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, and Alava, home to almost three-fourths of the Basque population, are undergoing a dramatic change. Among the population born before 1932, 28 percent speak Euskera. Among those born at the height of Franco’s repression, when teaching Euskera to your children meant labeling them as “troublemakers,” only 21 percent speak it. But since 1972, the percentage of fluent Basque speakers has steadily increased. Bilingual schooling is the common practice, and if trends continue, Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa will soon have a Basque-speaking majority.

  The Basque Nationalist Party government of the three provinces has taken over the education system, completely turning around the fate of the Basque language. Once a whispered rarity, Euskera is now commonly heard, not only in rural villages but on the streets of major cities. Even in Bilbao, one of the least Basque-speaking towns, Euskera is regularly heard. Having the language in common usage pressures increasing numbers of Spanish Basques to learn it. Among school-age Basques in Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya, it is the lingua franca.

  In the French provinces, or Northern Basqueland, as it is known in the government documents of Southern Basqueland, 37 percent of those born before 1932 speak Basque, but only 11 percent of those born between 1972 and 1980 do. Obviously, a language spoken predominantly by older people has a dubious future. And yet there are a number of reasons for French Basques not to despair. The percentage of Basque speakers in France has been rising recently because Euskera education in schools was legalized under Mitterrand and because, in 1980, volunteers began a program based on the ikastolas to the south.

  Spanish Basques have their own Basque governments that run school systems, finance programs, publish materials, and promote Basque culture. It is difficult for French Basques not to gaze covetously at the Basque governments in Spain which share their publishing, radio, and television with the north, where there are not enough public funds to have the equivalent programs.

  Since the French Revolution, the Basques of France have had no entity of their own in French administration. They belong to the Département of Pyrénées-Atlantique, which has some 750,000 people, little more than one-fourth of whom live in the Basque provinces.

  The government administrative system was designed in Paris with the intention of repressing regional cultures, but the Basques have periodically demanded their own Département. In 1836, the Chamber of Commerce in Bayonne, not an especially radical organization, petitioned the king to create a Basque Département, citing economic reasons. “Bayonne has no interest in common with Béarn,” the petition declared. In the 1960s, a growing Basque nationalist movement revived the old demand. In 1981, while campaigning for the presidency, Mitterrand made a list of 110 promises that he intended to fulfill upon taking office, including creation of a Basque Département. Though he surprised cynics by the number of promises he actually did fulfill, a Basque Département was not among them. Once in power, his government discovered, “The situation in Basqueland is very delicate.”

  The growing cultural movement, the yearnings being felt from watching the Autonomous Community across the border, seemed to worry Mitterrand. In a 1984 speech in Bayonne, he said: “It is time to say to our Basque compatriots, voilà! That which you would preserve so that future generations find intact the heritage that you received and even improved upon—if it is thought that this could serve as a clever first step from which to leap further, toward autonomy, toward independence, then I say clearly and eye to eye: not with me, no! I will not let the fabric of France be torn.”

  IN 1900 A Bordeaux physical education instructor, Philippe Tissié, concluded an essay on Basque sports by speculating on whether Basque culture was about to end. He noted that peasants were moving from rural areas, that “electricity now penetrated to even the smallest village . . . Electricity, telegraph, telephone, automobile, railroad, steam and electric tramways, such are the agents of progress that undermine poetic traditions and turn them into utilitarian prose.”

  To that formula could be added radio, television, and computers. What Tissié fore
saw was the fate of much of European culture, especially those cultures rooted in rural life. Yet the Basques have survived the twentieth century and ended it in some ways stronger than they were in 1900. This is partly because they have never abandoned their rural roots and they have used modern technology to be closer to them. The Carlist reverence for rural life remains. This is as true of the French Basques as of the Spanish. The French provinces have no real urban centers. The largest, Bayonne, would better be described as a large town. Even the Basque cities of the Spanish side, Pamplona, Vitoria, San Sebastián, and Bilbao, are by contemporary standards small and manageable, and much of the Basque population still lives outside them. Nor is urbanization a Basque trend. Modern communications and good roads have meant increased opportunities for Basques to return to their land.

  Traditional farm foods are becoming more popular than they have been for two generations. The spread of cider mills is one example. Pacharán, a light-alcohol drink made from sloe berries, a tiny wild plum from the mountains of northern Navarra, used to be a peasant drink in the mountains but has recently started appearing in bars, restaurants, and homes throughout Basqueland. Bortu gazna, mountain cheese, long the pride of Basque peasants, has also become fashionable in all seven provinces. Ewe’s milk, it seems, like people, develops a stronger character in the face of adversity. The tough grasses and shrubs of the mountaintops produce a more flavorful cheese than that of sheep grazing on lush green valley floors. This cheese can only be produced in May and June, while the valley cheese is made for six months. In a rural society noted for the equal division of labor between sexes, the prestigious mountain cheese is traditionally produced only by men. Part of the mystique of Martikorena, a popular Euskera folk singer and a shepherd from Basse Navarre, is the fact, well known in French Basqueland, that he makes excellent mountain cheese.

  Unformed cheese, sheep’s milk curdled with rennet, an enzyme found in the stomach of an unweaned lamb, and served as a kind of yogurt with mountain honey, used to be a meager staple of the rural poor. Known as mamia or, in Spanish, cuajada, it is now the fashionable dessert in fine restaurants in all seven provinces.

  Poster from the 1930s by Jean Paul Tillac. (Collection of the Musée Basque, Bayonne)

  The Asador Horma-Honda in the village of Bernagoitia, not far from Bilbao, serves modern rural food. Its recipe for cuajada, which follows, is a contemporary dessert made with industrially bottled rennet and unusual because it is made with sugar and cinnamon, instead of being served tart and sweetened by adding honey.

  CUAJADA

  Boil a liter of sheep’s milk with a stick of cinnamon. Let it cool a little, mix in sugar according to taste, and divide it into six cups. Add to each one a spoonful of rennet. Let completely cool and refrigerate.

  During cheese-making season, pigs graze on the slopes with the sheep so that Basques can feed them the whey, the nutritious liquid leftover. There was a uniquely Basque breed of pig in Labourd and Basse Navarre that grazed with the long-legged, hound-eared, white Basque sheep. In the early 1980s, Basques realized that the Basque breed of pig had died out. In the Aldudes Valley, which gets steeper and steeper until farmers along the French-Spanish border are looking into a deep green gorge, it was decided to bring back the Basque pig.

  The race was rebred from the few pigs remaining throughout the western Pyrenees who still had the characteristics. What is characteristic of a Basque pig? Appropriately, the most telling feature is extremely large ears, so large in fact that they fall over the pig’s face, nearly blinding the animal, resulting in a not typically Basque passive nature.

  THERE IS A movement in French Basqueland clearly influenced by events in Spanish Basqueland, and its activists like to call themselves abertzale, choosing a word Sabino Arana invented to mean “Basque nationalist,” or literally, “patriot.” As in Spain, French abertzale emerged in the 1930s, reemerged in the 1960s—a shoot from the Guernica oak was planted by the cherry orchards of Itxassou—and became stronger than ever in the 1980s and 1990s.

  A variety of nationalist parties, usually left-wing, began running candidates for local election. Herri Batasuna organized in the French provinces under the name Euskal Batasuna. Abertzale parties have struggled to get more than 10 percent of the vote in the larger towns but have made a significant showing in some rural villages, which is remarkable because a substantial part of the economy of French Basque villages, as much as two-thirds, comes from pensions, farm subsidies, and other social expenditures by the French state.

  Some French Basques worry that the abertzale movement will lead to a French ETA. ETA, they remember, started out as a nationalist movement promoting culture and ended up shooting Basque politicians and extorting money from Basque businessmen. For a brief moment, such a group did appear in France. Or did it?

  On December 11, 1973, the office of a medical school in a Basse Navarre village was raided, officials were roughed up, and documents were stolen by a group calling itself Iparretarrak, ETArists of the north. In their communique, published ten months later, they wrote: “Our country is in the process of dying, and it will die in a few years, our land will be the paradise of retirees, invalids, and foreigners . . . If we want our rights, if we want our freedom, we have only one route: fight.” Their principal activity was vandalizing the property of the tourism trade, especially in the summer when Parisians flood the coastal region and French campers and hikers take to the mountains. They used slogans such as “Our country is not for sale” and “Euskadi will never be a Riviera.” One arrest was made in 1977, but the suspect seemed to be a sympathizer, not an activist, and after 3,500 people signed a petition, he was released.

  In March 1980, two would-be Iparretarrak commandos decided to blow up the car of the wife of the sous-préfet in its parking place in the middle of the night. But, mishandling the explosives, the two blew themselves up instead. Given the type of devices and the time of night, the evidence indicates that they did not intend to hurt anyone, but many in French Basqueland saw this as evidence that their fears were coming true, that Iparretarrak, like ETA in the 1960s, was turning from vandalism to violence. Faced with violent attacks around the country by a variety of armed groups, both French and Middle Eastern, France started taking Iparretarrak seriously. Voters were demanding that the French police do something about terrorism, and it seemed likely that the French police would do a lot better up against these ETArists of the north than against Abu Nidal of Syria.

  French Basqueland found itself with what may be an even higher number of police per capita than Spanish Basqueland. Officially, the eight officers for every 1,000 inhabitants is almost double the French national ratio. But the police turned up with nothing. In 1982, two officers were killed in Basse Navarre, and the French Basque group was again suspected. Another suspect was the Basque-Spanish Battalion, the forerunner of GAL. The matter was never cleared up, and the Iparretarrak soon vanished.

  But the police remained. Unlike in Spain, they try not to let their presence be felt. From the French point of view, le Pays Basque is a tourist destination. Basque nationalism is often reduced to something folkloric, something nice for the tourists. French travel posters advertise, “Basqueland, land of folklore.” The ikurriña, that politically charged symbol that is fought over on the other side of the mountains, is a favorite souvenir of French Basqueland sold in every tourist shop—flags, scarves, earrings, key chains, even scented cardboard ikurriñas to dangle from the rearview mirror of the car.

  Efforts to revive folk customs, even when intended as political acts, get French government support because the tourists like these events. A group in the inland side of Labourd, concerned about reviving folk customs, went to Ituren in Navarra to study the joaldunak, grim-faced ancestral pagan characters who awaken spring with their giant copper bells and black horsehair whips. They learned how to make the cone-shaped hats and how to wear the big copper bells and perform the dances. They learned enough so that a troop of joaldunak could make an appearance
at a carnival festival, although their simple march in and out of town was not nearly as elaborate as the two-day ritual between Ituren and neighboring Zubieta. Joaldunak began appearing for the winter carnival in various Labourdine towns including St.-Jean-de-Luz, where the French always gave them a special round of applause. Joaldunak are characteristic of the residual pagan customs of northern Navarra but had never before appeared in Labourd, which leaves the question of whether a culture is being preserved or created in French Basqueland—what Mitterrand was referring to when he said that the legacy of Basque culture was being “even improved upon.” But the joaldunak at the St.-Jean-de-Luz carnival were no more incongruous than the Herri Batasuna campaign for local elections in 1998 in which Basque nationalists rode around San Sebastián with giant plaster joaldunak mounted on the roofs of cars. These joaldunak were not even somber looking. They had broad Howdy-Doody smiles.

  OVER THE BORDER, in Ituren, joaldunak arrived one by one at the town plaza, a small paved space surrounded by a town hall and four other stone buildings. Some walked and others came by car, already wearing their laced-up black moccasins, carrying their cone-shaped hats, sheepskins, and bells.

  In Ituren they have named the joaldunak Zanpantzar—a name which appears in all seven Basque dialects. In the French provinces, Zanpantzar is a grotesque papier-mâché giant, who is set on fire to burn away evil for the coming year and mark the end of carnival. But in Ituren, the name refers to a group of twenty joaldunak.

  Navarra is said to have been pro-Franco, but between the sheer slopes in this isolated narrow valley of the wandering Bidasoa River, there was little sympathy for the invading Fascist regime. At the very beginning of the Spanish Civil War, in September 1936, the Ituren village doctor, a passionate Basque nationalist, was taken out of town and shot by pro-Franco forces. This caused one of Europe’s oldest carnivals to disappear. It was not held in the winter of 1937 or for years afterward. The carnival, which predated the Christianization of Basques, had finally faded into history.