Basque country

In our travels, we have come across stories that are interesting side-lines from the usual tourist experience. 

The Basque Country is an area of NW Spain and SW France. The people who live there speak a different language from the rest of Spain, they may have some distinction genetically, and they have recently had some violent politics. I thought I would tell you about them. More here.

The Origin of the Basques. Good Wikipedia overview.

Basque language (Euskara). More here.

The language families of Europe fall into a few broad categories. There are the Indo-European languages, which include the Romance, Germanic, Slavic and Celtic subgroups, along with Greek and Albanian. The Iranian languages and most of the languages of India are also Indo-European. Then there are the languages of Finland and Hungary, which are hypothesized to be of a broader Finno-Ugric family. Whatever the validity of this cluster, the relationship of Hungarian and Finnish to languages which are extant deep into Eurasia, beyond the Urals and into Siberia, is not disputed. Turkic and Semitic families have a toehold in Europe via Turkish and Maltese. And finally, you have the Basque dialects. Basque is not related to any other language in the world; it is a linguistic isolate. There have been attempts to connect Basque to languages in the Caucasus, but these are highly speculative conjectures.

After the Ice – Maps of Early European Migrations

A language isolate, Basque is believed to be one of the few surviving pre-Indo-European languages in Europe, and is the only one in Western Europe.

The green area shows the area where the Basque language was spoken before the Carthaginians (from Carthage, in modern Tunisia), together with Berbers, invaded in 237 BC. The Romans pushed the Carthaginians out in the Second Punic War in 206 BC. 

Genetics. More here: The Genetic History of Europe

The Last Glacial Maximum was about 26,500 years ago. It lead to the depopulation of much of northern Europe, which was under ice. A few refuges remained, including the Franco-Cantabrian refugium in Northern Iberia and Southwest France. This coincides with the Basque Country. One theory is that Basque genetics and language represent a residue from the time after Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH; sometimes known as Cro-Magnons) arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago, displacing the Neanderthals,  who had been here from about 130,000 years ago.

Europeans drawn from three ancient 'tribes'

Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans

Iberian Peninsula, last refuge of the European lineage surviving the Ice Age

Attempts to prove this have been changing rapidly with new genetic technologies in the last few years. There is a review of the topic here. But the current state of play appears to be that Basques are not genetically distinct from other people in the Iberian peninsular.

A genome-wide survey does not show the genetic distinctiveness of Basques.

Ancient genomes show how humans escaped Europe’s deep freeze. Nature, 1st March 2023. A pair of ancient-genome studies shows that humans who had holed up in the Iberian Peninsula repopulated Western Europe after the retreat of glaciers that covered large parts of the continent from about 26,000 to 19,000 years ago.

Politics
The Spanish Civil War started in 1936, when there was a military coup led by General Franco. The elected republican government fought back, with the help of the Soviet Union, and numbers of volunteers from Western countries, including George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Ernest Hemingway. Franco was helped by the German Nazis under Hitler, and Italian Fascists under Mussolini. The Fascists won in 1939.

Franco asked Hitler to bomb a town in the Basque Country, Guernica, in 1937. It caused massive destruction, and led Picasso to paint a famous anti-war painting.

Guernica

The Franco dictatorship continued until his death in 1975. He did a number of things to suppress the Basques, including trying to eradicate the Basque language. 

Many people were involved in opposition to Franco, including a group in the Basque area called ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, "Basque Country and Freedom".) In a way that resembles the development of the IRA in Northern Ireland, ETA morphed from an independence movement into a terrorist group. 

In December 1973, ETA assassinated Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco's chosen successor and president of the government (a position roughly equivalent to being a prime minister).

Their activities continued after the restoration of democracy in Spain, and they became increasingly violent.

In the last episode of this blog, I showed a picture of a large floral puppy outside the Guggenheim museum. 

ETA target

In 1997, ETA terrorists were caught planting anti-tank bombs among the flowers in preparation for an attack. They shot and killed a policeman who confronted them.

On another occasion they kidnapped a young local politician and made demands about ETA prisoners, with a count-down. When the Spanish government failed to meet their demands, they killed him. This led to much public opposition to ETA. 

Between 1968 and 2010, ETA killed 829 people (including 340 civilians) and injured thousands more. In October 2011 ETA declared a cease-fire which has persisted. They were suspected of carrying out the 2004 Madrid train bombings which killed 193 people and injured around 2,000. It was subsequently shown to be the responsibility of Islamists from Morocco.

Recently a novel 'Patria' by Fernando Aramburu has been translated into English, with the title 'Homeland'. It concerns the consequences of the ETA insurgency for two families. Kindle link here.  London Times Review here. Washington Post review. NY Times review.

Coincidentally, we were exploring the old town of San Sebastian when we came across a film-shoot. We were shuffled out of the way while a crowd of actors and extras walked down a street. It turned out that they were filming 'Patria'.

Filming an HBO TV series 'Patria'