Dance is such a key component of Basque culture, especially for those living in the diaspora, where it is a central aspect of Basque identity. Almost all Basque kids who grow up in Basque-rich communities spend a few years in a dance group. I spent a few years in Caldwell’eko Eusko Dantzariak, started in 1980 […]
Buber’s Basque Page is 25 years old! I first started working on what would become this site back in the fall of 1994. I had just started graduate school in the Physics Department at the University of Washington. I was very lucky to have a fellowship that freed me from teaching duties, so I used […]
A year ago, I was thinking about how I could inject some freshness into my page. The page has been going for a while now, and the previous attempts I’d made to add something special — Nor Naiz, Gu Gara; Did You Know…?; The Basque-t Cases — didn’t go very far, for many different reasons. […]
Guillermo Zubiaga sent me this strange and funny bit from Los Grandes Enigmas de Martin Mystere, Investigador de lo Imposible, a Spanish translation of an Italian comic published in 1982. In the comic, the hero encounters an unknown tribe in Belize. I don’t know anything about the plot, but there are a few scenes in […]
If you are interested in finding out more about your Basque surname or your Basque ancestry, an excellent resource is the group basque-genealogy. For many years, the group has been hosted by Yahoo Groups. However, with their change in service conditions, the group owner, Cecilia Puchulutegui, is moving it to Groups.io. If you’ve never checked […]
In almost any Basque-themed celebration of Christmas, instead of Santa Claus, a very distinct figure appears, wearing not a bright red suit trimmed in white but rather a more mundane outfit, often a blue or black shirt with blue pants topped off with a black beret. In modern times, he is portrayed as a joyful […]
Basques played enormous and outsized roles in the centuries of military activity of both France and Spain. Both countries had colonies across the world, held together through military might. Basques were a large part of that history. Perhaps one of the most distinguished military commanders in all of Spanish history is Blas de Lezo y […]
Basque is an ancient language, predating the Indo-European languages of Europe that surround it. Despite this long history, it is only recently that Basque has become a literary language, with a healthy, if small, corpus of written works. Perhaps even more surprising is that the formal teaching of subjects in the Basque language is not […]
At the heart of Bilbao’s transformation from an industrial center to a world-renowned tourist destination sits the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. While today, one cannot think of the city without envisioning the museum, there was significant resistance to the construction at the time. Now, other cities try to reproduce the so-called “Bilbao Effect” or “Guggenheim Effect,” […]
The Basque Witch Trials epitomized a time of hysteria and violence. Inspired to some degree by the neighboring trials in France, almost 7,000 people were investigated by the Spanish Inquisition on suspicions of being witches or dealing in witchcraft. While not so many were executed, by European standards, the wealth and breadth of records associated […]
