Forty years ago, the most horrific airline disaster to ever occur in the Basque Country happened just outside of my dad’s hometown of Munitibar. Even today, the crash is imprinted on the collective minds of the local Basques – more than once it has come up in conversation when I’ve visited the Basque Country. While Oiz is known […]
Basque names have a way of jumping out at you. I was recently attending a workshop at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, situated on the Stanford University campus, when someone mentioned the Arrillaga rec center. “Arrillaga?” I thought to myself. “Has to be Basque.” Sure enough, John Arrillaga, one of Stanford’s biggest supporters ever, was […]
The Basque diaspora – those Basques that have found themselves for a multitude of reasons living and building lives outside of the Basque Country – have made significant contributions to the continued health and prosperity of Basque culture. Inspired by the motto Zazpiak Bat – the seven are one – the phrase Zortziak Bat has been used […]
I’ve written about how, when I returned from my year in the Basque Country, I sort of shocked my dad by playing some Basque punk. However, I also came back with some folk music, including Oskorri. This, my dad could get in to. When he left the Basque Country, they didn’t have recordings of all of […]
While the Basque Country has seemingly punched above its weight in terms of its contributions to history, its contributions to philosophy are perhaps less well known. On July 1, the Basque Country lost one of its heavyweights. Joxe Azurmendi was one of the intellectual leaders of the modern Basque Country. It is impossible to do […]
The three Basque cities I’ve spent the most time in are Donostia, Munitibar, and Ermua. My dad’s sister and her family settled in Ermua as that is where the job was – her husband worked for the knife company Aitor until he retired. Ermua maybe doesn’t have the charm of the coastal cities, but it has its own unique […]
by Sancho de Beurko Association This article was written by Pedro Oiarzabal. Martin, born on July 4, 1925, in Las Arenas, Getxo (Bizkaia), was one of the thousands of children evacuated by the Basque government in June 1937 to escape the aerial bombardments perpetrated by General Francisco Franco’s Italian and German allies against the civilian […]
It is seemingly part of human nature that we most vehemently attack that which is somehow a part of us. Pierre de Lancre was no different. One of the most infamous persecutors of Basque witches, he himself had Basque ancestry, an ancestry that his family seemed to deny. De Lancre felt that all aspects of […]
One of the aspects of Basque culture that has always fascinated me is the mix of tradition with the most cutting edge ideas. Growing up in the Basque communities of the American West, I was exposed more to the traditional aspects of the culture – the dancing, the singing – and less to the avant garde that […]
Basques have long been associated with whaling. Records as far back as 670 highlight the importance that whale hunting was to the Basque economy and their way of life. However, the people that inhabited the region we now know as the Basque Country used resources from whales even earlier, many millennia earlier. New research has revealed that […]