Top Quotes: “The Basque History of the World” — Mark Kurlansky

Introduction

“Basques invented their own language and their own shoes, espadrilles. They also created numerous sports including not only pelota but wagon-lifting contests called orgo joko, and sheep fighting known as aharitalka. They developed their own farm tools such as the two-pronged hoe called a laia, their own breed of cow known as the blond cow, their own sheep called the whitehead sheep, and their own breed of pig, which was only recently rescued from extinction.

And so they also have their own black cherry, the xapata from Itxassou, which only bears fruit for a few weeks in June but is so productive during those weeks that a large surplus is saved in the form of preserves.”

“Inte Basque language, which is called Euskera, there is no word for Basque. The only word to identify a member of their group is Euskaldun-Euskera speaker. Their land is called Euskal Herria — the land of Euskera speakers.

It is language that defines a Basque.”

“THE CENTRAL MYSTERY IS: Who are the Basques? The early Basques left no written records, and the first accounts of them, two centuries after the Romans arrived in 218 B.C., give the impression that they were already an ancient-or at least not a new — people. Artifacts predating this time that have been found in the area — a few tools, drawings in caves, and the rudiments of ruins — cannot be proved to have been made by Basques, though it is supposed that at least some of them were.

Ample evidence exists that the Basques are a physically distinct group. There is a Basque type with a long straight nose, thick eyebrows, strong chin, and long earlobes.”

“In past eras, when Spaniards and French were typically fairly small people, Basque men were characteristically larger, thick chested, broad shouldered, and burly. Because these were also characteristics of Cro-Magnons, Basques are often thought to be direct descendants of this man who lived 40,000 years ago.”

“Twenty-seven percent of Basques have O Rh negative blood. Rh negative blood in a pregnant woman can fatally poison a fetus that has positive blood. Since World War Il, intervention techniques to save the fetus have been developed, but it is probable that throughout history, the rate of miscarriage and stillborn births among the Basques was extremely high, which may be one of the reasons they remained a small population on a limited amount of land while other populations, especially in Iberia, grew rapidly.”

“This agglutinating language only has about 200,000 words, but its vocabulary is greatly extended by almost 200 standard suffixes. In contrast, the Oxford English Dictionary was compiled from a data base of 60 million words, but English is a language with an unusually large vocabulary. It is sometimes said that Euskera includes just nouns, verbs, and suffixes, but relatively simple concepts can become words of formidable size. Iparsor-talderatu is a verb meaning “to head in a northeasterly direction.””

Early History

“Their defeat by the Romans marks the beginning of the first known instance of Basques tolerating occupation without armed resistance. But the reason appears to be that the Romans, intent on more fertile parts of Iberia, learned to coexist with the Basques, and the Basques came to learn that Roman occupation did not threaten their language, culture, or legal traditions. The Romans came to understand that the Basques could be pacified by special conditions of autonomy. The Basques paid no tribute and had no military occupation. Most important of all, they were not ruled directly by a Roman code of law but were allowed to govern themselves under their own tradition-based system of law. The Romans asked little more from Basques than free passage between southern Gaul and the lands beyond the Ebro.

The Basques were left to their beloved sense of themselves, surrounded by an empire to which they didn’t belong, speaking a language that none of their neighbors understood.”

“The Visigoths were one of many misfortunes of history that helped preserve the Basques. The constant warfare united a people who had previously remained separate mountain tribes.”

“The Basques always resisted not only militarily but culturally. They kept their language and religion. Only after the fall of the Visigoths did Christianity slowly penetrate Basque culture, and even then, Basque religious beliefs coexisted with Christianity for centuries. Some still survive.”

“FOR SEVERAL CENTURIES, while everyone around them spoke Latin languages, the Basques spoke Euskera. While neighboring cultures followed the male line, the female line of Basques inherited property and tides because women did the farm work, while men went off to war.

While everyone else was Christian, the Basques worshiped the sun and moon and a pantheon of nature spirits. Surrounded by the cult of Jesus Christ and the apostles, they had Baxajaun, the hairy lord of the forest, and Mari, who dwelled in caves and assumed many forms. And while all the people around them had learned from the Romans to live by a legal code, Basque law was still based on unwritten custom.”

“It was during this long period of fighting with the Muslims that the Basques became Christians, part of the Christian struggle to drive out the infidel, what is called in Spain the Reconquista. The earliest estimates place the Christianization of the Basques in the seventh century, but some historians believe that the Basques were not a Christian people until the tenth or eleventh century. In any case, the Basques were not dependable Christians. They did not fight for Christianity; they fought for Basqueland, which the Franks threatened at least as much as the Muslims. Basques let Abd-al-Rahman pass through their mountains because he was on his way to fight the Franks. Some Basques even fought against Charles Martel in France a few years after Poitiers. But in Iberia they fought against the Muslim takeover.

And so this small people fought both Christians and Muslims and managed to survive and keep their lands.”

“When Iñigo, a natural leader who was consumed with his new religion, formed the small Latin Quarter group, Francisco laughed at him, found his sayings trite and his vows of poverty ridiculous. The once vain Iñigo, now lame and aging, showed a new tolerance for this tall young athlete whose family had been his enemies in war. Two decades later, Iñigo’s secretary would write that Iñigo referred to Francisco as “the roughest clay he ever had to knead.” According to legend, after two years of intellectual jousting, with Francisco mocking the less educated figo’s attempts to preach, and Iñigo flattering the younger man’s vanity, Iñigo finally won him over.

On August 15, 1534, Iñigo and his group of seven founded their new order, the Society of Jesus, otherwise known as the Jesuits. The founding ceremony, typically Jesuit and, perhaps, typically Basque, took place by a crypt in Montmartre, a subterranean site beneath the hill north of Paris, said to be of pagan significance. The Jesuits, whose vows were simply chastity, poverty, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, would become known for a tendency toward the occult but also for their strict discipline. They shunned the wearing of habits and renounced loyalty to local Church hierarchy. But they were fiercely loyal to the pope, leading the orthodox Counter-Reformation that tried to reclaim Protestant populations.”

“After the Muslims seized the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in the late eleventh century and pilgrims stopped going to the Middle East, Santiago de Compostela became the leading Christian pilgrimage.

Pilgrims came from throughout Europe, especially from France. Some did not go by choice but were ordered as penance for some blasphemy or crime. Affluent criminals would hire impoverished people to make the pilgrimage on their behalf.”

“A people are shaped by their land, and the mountains of Basqueland, the green slopes that no one else would fight as hard for, could not support a population. Despite a lush appearance, the land is not fertile, and Basques always needed to look beyond Basqueland for food. It had been this special need for imports that had induced Castilian kings to exclude the Basques from the Spanish customs zone.”

“THE CHILI PEPPER was easy for Europeans to understand.

In a sense, it was what Columbus had gone looking for, a spice. Exotic spices were already one of the most lucrative trades in the world. Columbus must have immediately recognized that hot peppers were valuable because he named them after the already high priced black pepper, pimienta. The new spice was called pimiento — masculine pepper, like black pepper but stronger. “Mejor que pimienta nuestra,” Better than our pepper, he reported.

The chili pepper was sold by Basques, Spaniards, and Portuguese to Africa, the Middle East, the Asian subcontinent, and the Far East. Its trading value soon declined because the plant was easily cultivated in these climates. Most Europeans ate only the mild sweet peppers. Basques were the only Europeans to have adopted a taste for hot peppers directly from America.

Guindilla peppers, grown in the Spanish Basque provinces, are pickled green or chopped into food when dried and red. Espelette, a whitewashed town next to St. Pée, is famous for its peppers. The small thin ones and the slightly hotter larger ones grow green but turn bright red in September, when they are harvested. The peppers are then strung through their stems and hung from the southern side of houses to dry, the lines of peppers echoing the traditional red trim of the white buildings. These peppers are used in the local sausage and many other dishes to give a subtle heat, nothing comparable to the fire of Caribbean or Mexican food, but the hottest burn of any cuisine in France. On the last Sunday in October, worshipers in Espelette are given a blessing and a string of dried peppers at Mass.”

“The European distaste for burning-hot pepper is in perfect balance with nature because hot American peppers when grown in Europe give off little heat. The burning taste comes from a substance called capsaicin, whose burn increases when the pepper is grown in strong sunlight. Capsaicin is a failed chemical defense for plants.

Most animals won’t eat plants that contain capsaicin, but many non-European humans are not deterred. The large red choricero, so called because it is used in chorizo sausage, has little heat when grown in Vizcaya on the wet fields near Guernica. When picked young and green, it is called a Guernica pepper. The same Guernica or choricero peppers, grown in the much sunnier Rioja, will begin to take on the sting of a chili.”

“Under the French monarchy, like the Spanish one, Basques had carved out a complicated relationship in which their Foral rights of self-determination were respected. But the Revolution sought change. Even calendars and maps were to be redrawn. To carry out a detailed agenda of radical change, a true revolution, the revolutionaries in Paris wanted complete control. In 1789, the revolutionary National Assembly, which was to establish liberties, eliminated the three Basque provinces — Labourd, Basse Navarre, and Soule — and fused them with Béarn into a single Departement. The entire Département system was created to break up the many ethnic identities within France and make all regions “equally French.”

Having lost their provinces, French Basques would now be required to pay taxes to the French government rather than to their own Foral administration and to serve in the French military wherever they were sent, instead of being responsible exclusively for the defense of their own region. Paris even attempted to obliterate Euskera place-names. Ustaritz became Marat-sur-Nive, Baïgorry became Thermopyles, Itxassou became Union. Even already Frenchified names were changed. St.-Jean-de-Luz, long ago translated from its Basque name of Donibane Lohitzune, was now changed to Chauvin-Dragon. None of these revolutionary names would endure, but the centralism would.

With the abolition in French Basqueland of the Fueros, or Fors, as they were called in French, Basques were suddenly required to abandon their traditional laws, codified more than 250 years earlier, and accept an entirely different system of law, eventually to be established in the Napoleonic Code of 1804. The ancient custom of collectively owned land would be abolished. The law of inheritance would be changed. Ancient Basque law distinguished between acquired goods, which could be willed, and inherited goods — the house, the etxea, and what belonged to the house — which had to be passed down, without distinction of sex, to the firstborn. Under the new legal code, each child had an equal claim to all property, which would result in ever smaller holdings. In time it would cause many etxea to disappear.”

“At this point, Basqueland was almost entirely in French hands and the closest it had ever been to a united seven provinces. But the Spanish won back at the peace table what they had lost on the battlefield. All they had to give up for the return of their Basque provinces were their claims to the western third of the island of Hispaniola, present-day Haiti, an area where a slave revolt would explode in a few years and destroy two elite French armies in a decade of brutal conflict.

Many factors had contributed to the humiliating failure of the Spanish troops. The French had three times as many soldiers, and they were better trained and better equipped. But the Spanish military blamed the failure on the Basques. The fierce Basques on the border failed to be fierce, had not crushed the invader, had not even tried. A strong element in Madrid became hostile to traditional Basque rights and increasingly questioned the sanctity of the Fueros.”

“Basqueland, unlike southern Spain, did not have the problem of huge wasteful landholdings, the so-called latifundia that led to centuries of social conflict in Andalusia, from where it was exported to Latin America.

In those regions a small aristocracy controlled the latifundia, tracts of land that were too vast to be completely utilized, while the peasantry suffered from a shortage of arable land. Basques like to say that they avoided the latifundia problem because they had a more democratic tradition. But the reverse may well be true. Perhaps it is the land that shapes the laws. Fueros are a less feudal and more democratic code than other European medieval law because the land did not lend itself to the feudal system. The Basques lacked large tracts of fertile farmland. Nature broke up Basqueland into smaller plots.”

“Franco, for the most part, was a successful liar. Though few people completely believed his explanations of Guernica, subsequent generations of Basques, having grown up going to Franco’s schools, often believe the Guernica death toll to be far less than the staggering numbers asserted by witnesses and accepted by historians in the rest of Europe. One of Franco’s most successful lies was that through his cleverness, he had outmaneuvered Hitler and kept Spain out of World War II. Then, according to him, he seduced the Americans. Even today, Spaniards of Republican families who grew up hating Franco but attending his school system believe these myths.

In reality, Franco had desperately wanted to get into the war. The war machine the Germans and Italians had shown him stretched his military imagination to its limits. At the outset of World War II, it did not even occur to him that other nations might possess the military power not only to stop but to defeat the Germans. Certain of German victory, he hoped for a share of the war booty. He was especially interested in gaining more of Morocco at France’s expense. But the Germans thought that he was an ineffective general and that his army was poorly equipped and backward. After the Civil War, the Spanish economy having collapsed, hunger and unemployment were widespread, and the Germans reasoned that if Spain were an ally, Germany would have to feed its people, arm them, train them, even, as the Germans had done in the Civil War, fight for them. Hitler repeatedly spurned Franco’s offers.”

“Franco made his case for entering the war. Hitler talked of his war problems. Franco talked of his supply needs to ready for war. The two conversations rarely intersected. Hitler began to grow irritated. Franco, to show a knowledge of war strategy, suggested, as an aide had told him, that once England was defeated, the British would still fight on from Canada. The Führer did not find this an interesting point and, hopping to his feet, announced with notable agitation that it would be pointless to continue the conversation.

From this meeting, Franco let it be widely known in Spain that he, their Caudillo, had held off the Nazis at Hendaye, that they had come threatening to take over Spain, and he had masterfully negotiated Spanish neutrality.”

“THE BASQUE NATIONALISTS claim that after the Civil War, during Franco’s World War II neutrality, 21,780 Basques were executed. The figure has never been verified. In San Sebastián, by the graceful curve of the world’s most beautiful urban beach, was a prison where Franco’s men shot Basque nationalists almost every day until 1947.

Immediately after the Basque provinces had been taken, Franco outlawed the Euskera language. The Basques were told to “speak Christian.” Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, the “traitor provinces,” were singled out for special punishment and lost all rights of self-rule.”

“ETA would not have been able to recruit among workers if it had not rewritten Aranism. Their new nonracist definition of Basques was essential since many of the workers were of non-Basque origin. To be a Basque, they had only to learn the language and embrace the culture, which many did. And even the ones who didn’t, posed no ideological problem for the new nationalists. Asked who is a Basque, Txillardegi recently said, “A Basque is someone who speaks Basque. But there are Basques who don’t. It is something imposed by Madrid. They are victims.”

A workable definition of who is a Basque also became more important because Franco had a policy of populating Basque country with people from other parts of Spain. By the time of his death in 1975, more than 40 percent of the population of the Spanish Basque provinces had no Basque parent.”

“If they were open to Basque culture, if they learned the language, then, as far as ETA was concerned, they could become Basques, and, more important, they could become Basque nationalists. By the 1970s, only about half the members of ETA had two Basque parents.”

“The most significant cultural advance of the 1960s was that the Basque Academy of Language at last realized its dream of unifying the Basque language. Although the earliest record of written Basque is from the third century, it remained mostly an oral language until the twentieth century. The reason for its slow development as a written language was not, as Unamuno had suggested, that agglutinating languages are unsuitable for literature. The problem was that Euskera varied so much from one region to another. The local dialect worked well for talking to a neighbor. It asserted intimacy, membership in a community. But Spanish, the universal language, was preferred for writing something down to be read by a large number of people.

Seven distinct dialects of Euskera are spoken: one from each of the seven provinces, with an eighth in eastern Navarra known as Alto Navarra Meridionale. Many of the differences stem from pronunciation. Dut, from the verb “to have,” becomes det in Guipúzcoa and dot in Vizcaya.”

“Generally, Basques can understand each other, though there are moments, such as Txillardegi’s call for clandestine ducks, when the meaning is entirely changed. Vizcaya and Soule, the two geographic extremes of Basqueland, are also the linguistic extremes of Euskera. The geographically central dialects, especially Guipúzcoan, are more easily understood by most Basques than Vizcayan or Souletine. But even Guipúzcoan, which is not only from a centrally located province but also from the province with the largest number of Euskera speakers, is not a universal Basque. Without a common written language, a Basque writer had a minuscule readership— only Euskera readers of the author’s native province. In 1571, a Bible was published in Euskera with a prologue that said, “We should try to find the most common language possible.” But such a universal Euskera did not exist.

Some authors wrote in several dialects. The first novelist in Euskera, the late-nineteenth-century romantic Domingo de Aguirre, was from the Vizcayan port of Ondarroa but tried to increase his readership by writing some of his novels in Vizcayan dialect and others in Guipúzcoan. Even after the Basque Academy of Language was founded in 1918 with the stated goal of finding a common written language, it took decades to develop it. Impatiently, Xabier de Lizardi, one of the most influential Basque writers of the early twentieth century, wrote poetry in a unified language of his own invention. But most Euskera readers found it difficult to understand.

In the 1960s, the Basque academy established a common written language, which was called Batua. The twenty-four-member academy, each member representing a different linguistic tendency, tried to identify the word forms that were most commonly used. This often led them to the Guipúzcoan version. They also favored the older version over the contemporary, but rejected words and forms that were no longer in use.”

“Carrero Blanco went to Mass as usual, parking his car at 9:30 in the usual place. One hundred and sixty-five pounds of dynamite sent the car several stories into the air over the top of a building. According to one immediate and popular joke, the admiral had become the first Spanish astronaut. “Una bache mas, un cabron menos,” One more pothole, one less asshole, was another popular comment.”

“Whatever is the judgment of history, at the time the assassination was widely seen as the end of Francoism. The stagnating nation felt exhilarated. Leaders such as Felipe González, Communist chief and Second Republic veteran Santiago Carillo, and both Basque and Catalan leaders began secretly meeting to plan for a transition to democracy.”

“To the dismay of many Basques, Navarra became a separate region. Conservative, pro-Spanish elements in Navarra had pushed for a region apart from the three Basque provinces, but whether or not this was the will of the general population was a long-standing debate. In 1981, the so-called politico-militar wing of ETA made a Navarrese referendum on rejoining the Basque region one of its conditions for a ceasefire. Madrid never responded to that item.

The many differences accrued from several historic periods have separated Navarra from the other three Basque provinces in Spain. Going back to Roman times, the Romanization of the Ebro Valley had made Navarra, by most definitions, only half Basque. The area south of Pamplona is not culturally Basque, and “Span-ish” political parties — what the Basques call, not without a slight sneer, Españolistas, Spain lovers — win a far higher percentage of the vote in Navarra than they do in the other Basque provinces. The split over the Kingdom of Navarra, the split over the Carlist Wars, the split over Franco and the Civil War — two separate histories have driven these people apart.

Opinion polls in Navarra indicate that only a minority of Navarrese consider themselves Spanish, but a somewhat smaller minority consider themselves Basque. The majority of modern Navarrese think of themselves as simply Navarrese. But the Navarrese speak Euskera and fit almost any definition of Basque — except theirs. If the seven provinces were to be united today, a separatist movement might emerge in Navarra.”

“Spain was to have its transition to democracy without purging a single figure from the Franco era, without prosecuting a single one of the many crimes these men had committed over forty years. The democracy would be built without purging the ranks of the military, the Guardia Civil, or even the operations of prisons.

The nations of western Europe had learned the same lesson as the Spanish politicians. They had almost seen their neighbor return yet again to the 1930s. In the future Spain would be encouraged and not criticized. There would no longer be discussion of its human rights record. Spain would be welcomed into the ranks of Europe. A great effort would be made to move forward its request for membership in the European Economic Community. The West would also persuade Spain to join NATO, thereby integrating its troublesome troops into the Western alliance.

Even ETA was changed by the coup. The Spanish government’s frustrating two year negotiation with ETA’s politico-militar wing suddenly bore fruit. The members of politico-militar saw that they would be defenseless if the military overthrew the democracy, and concluded that continuing to attack the current Spanish state would be too dangerous for the Basque people. In exchange for an amnesty and release from prison of its members, ETA politico-militar dissolved. But that did not end the violence because other branches of ETA were still active. There is always a splinter group. In time the Spanish government has come to feel that no matter what it negotiates with ETA, a dissident group refusing the accord will always emerge.”

Conclusion

“FRENCH POLICY TOWARD “the Basque problem” has always been to keep it in Spain. As long as the problem stayed in Spain, ETA members could stay in France. The French government’s support of Spanish Basque refugees had long helped to keep peaceful relations between Paris and French Basques. But after the death of Franco, French foreign policy changed. Being an enemy of Spain no longer gave a Spanish refugee automatic legitimacy in France. Since the Spanish government was no longer unquestionably the villain, Basques were no longer unquestionably the victims. Political refugee status and work permits for Spanish Basques were no longer automatically granted. Increasingly, French police rounded up Basques, not all of them ETA members, for questioning, broke into homes, and searched without warrants.

Suspected ETA members were arrested and sometimes spent months in prison without being charged with a crime. In 1979, the French government ended political refugee status for newly arrived Basques. But it still refused to extradite Basques to Spain.”

“Without the Basque and Catalan provinces, the two most productive regions, Spain would become an impoverished third-world nation.”

“The 212,000 people in the French Basque provinces represent less than 9 percent of Basques.”

“Under French administration, Basque culture had suffered a slow erosion over 160 years, but between 1965 and 1970, Euskera experienced a sudden, powerful blow: Television was introduced to rural France. For the first time in history, the French language was commonly heard in the homes of Basque farmers.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The most visible language fight is over signs on the highway. Slowly, names are changing back to the Basque spelling. Many are easy to understand. Guernica in Euskera is Gernika. Bilbao is Bilbo. But San Sebastián is Donostia, Vitoria is Gasteiz, Pamplona is Iruña, Fuenterrabía is Hondarribia. The only solution that would not lead to thousands of outsiders getting lost on the highway is to do what any small country with an obscure language might do, print names in two languages. But for twenty years, vigilante nationalists have been spray-painting away the Spanish names. The result is exactly what was intended: Anybody who spends any time in Basqueland knows the towns by their Basque names.”

“The Guggenheim Foundation, in financial difficulty, was shopping for a site to build a new Guggenheim, one that would not cost the foundation anything and in fact would generate revenue for it. Tokyo, Osaka, Moscow, Vienna, Graz, and Salzburg were among the cities that had already turned down this financially dubious proposition.”

“To calculate the exact cost to Euskadi taxpayers of the Bilbao Guggenheim is complicated, or perhaps the leadership wants it to be complicated. The figure usually mentioned is $100 million, which is equal to $56 for each citizen. After paying for the building, the Basques also agreed to pay the Guggenheim for using the Guggenheim name on the building. Furthermore, the Guggenheim Foundation chooses the art for the Bilbao museum. The survey of twentieth-century art that made up the initial exhibit seemed like leftovers from the Guggenheim warehouse. The museum, with the exception of a few Chillida pieces, pays no homage to Basque art.”

“The death of Franco was an economic disaster for the Basques, though one few regretted. He had used Basque industry as the engine for a false economy, without exports or foreign markets — an economy that was almost completely within Spain and therefore within his control. Basque industry, the oldest in southern Europe, was archaic. This was true of not only steel but shipbuilding and manufacturing.”

“Spain, like Russia, had intentionally built its railroad tracks with a nonstandard measurement to protect against invasion by rail.”

“A 1998 poll in Spanish Basqueland showed that 88 percent wanted to circumvent Madrid and have direct relations with the European Union.

In the idealized new Europe, economies are merged, citizenship is merged. But those who support the idea deny that countries will be eliminated. There will simply be a new idea of a nation — a nation that maintains its own culture and identity while being economically linked and politically loyal to a larger state. Some 1,800 years ago, the Basques told the Roman Empire that this was what they wanted. Four centuries ago, they told it to Ferdinand of Aragon. They have told it to François Mitterrand and Felipe González and King Juan Carlos.

They watch Europe unfolding and wonder what has happened to their old adversaries. Most of the political leaders endorse the new Europe whether their citizens do or not. Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, González, and Aznar were all strong backers of this new Europe. The Basques watch the French and Spanish give up their borders and their currency and wonder why it is so easy for them.”

“The Basques are not isolationists. They never wanted to leave Europe. They only wanted to be Basque. Perhaps it is the French and the Spanish, relative newcomers, who will disappear in another 1,000 years. But the Basques will still be there, playing strange sports, speaking a language of ks and that no one else understands, naming their houses and facing them toward the eastern sunrise in a land of legends, on steep green mountains by a cobalt sea — still surviving, enduring by the grace of what Juan San Martin called Euskaldun bizi nahia, the will to live like a Basque.”