Basque ethnography at a glance
St John’s church, nowadays disappeared. Bombing of Gernika Documentation Center. Gernika Peace Museum Foundation.
The previous post described the two first stages of the attack, which ended with the following two phases and their consequences.
3. Forty minutes later, three K/88 squadrons with a total of 21 Junkers Ju52 heavy bombers attacked from the north and were not seen by the people keeping watch until it was too late.
Bombing of Gernika Documentation Center. Gernika Peace Museum Foundation.
Juan Antonio Ansaldo, the commander of the rebel forces visited Gernika after the bombing to see its impact. Year later, he would write in his diary that when Goering was questioned about the “holy city of the Basques” during the Nuremberg trials, he replied that it was a type of “testing ground” for the Luftwaffe and that there was nowhere else to conduct those experiments.
The Condor Legion was organised by Goering to show that a large-scale bombing technique would win the coming war, World War II. Wolfram von Richthofen was the Legion’s Chief of Staff and was tasked with carrying out the “perfect bombing” on the Basque front. Durango on 31 March, Eibar on 25 April and Gernika on 26 April were part of a military experiment consisting of bombing an urban centre in successive barrages using explosive and incendiary bombs. A formation that would later be used in World War II in cities including Rotterdam and Warsaw, and also by the Allies in Dresden. (more…)
San Antolines in Lekeitio (1996). Josu Larrinaga Zugadi.
As a general rule, uncertainty of catches or whether the weather conditions would allow the boats to set to sea was constant in the many seafaring ports scattered along the coast of the Bay of Biscay; they were noted for their higgledy-piggledy humble dwellings in different colours (made out of materials used to build and maintain the vessels, accessed up steep staircases, with uneven floors and roofs or fitted pallets); battered ports and vessels, bearing the brunt of the usual accidents or losses of fishermen; along with poor catches or the meagre earnings that condemned their inhabitants to a life of misery. Things are very different now and they are now attractive and pleasant places that are popular tourist and foodie destinations.
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The subject that concerns us here goes from the universal to the particular, from the simple to the complex. As the seventeeth-century English writer Joseph Addison said, «colours speak all languages, but words are understood only by such a people or nation». And the Basque people are not an exception to this maxim, because the pattern of the colors that the Basque language draws us does not match that of the languages which surround us.
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