On My Reading List

In April, I traveled to Pais Vasco, or the Basque Region, in Spain with a few friends who had flown in from the U.S. That region of the country has been made famous by ETA, the terrorist pro-sovereignty group that has killed over 800 people since it's founding in 1959. Yesterday, the most recent fatal attack occured in a town just outside of Bilbao, famous for it's Guggenheim Museum, in which a police officer was killed. Usually, the attacks are non-fatal, such as the attack in October at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, and sometimes attacks that are not intended to have victims end up being fatal, such as the bombing of Madrid's Barajas Airport parking garage bombing in 2006. The group is viewed in understandably bad light by the rest of the world and even the residents of Pais Vasco are mostly unsupportive of the group that brings shameful fame to their culturally significant little corner of the Bay of Biscay.


Most of what I know I learned from a good friend of mine who studied the violent nationalist group in college and wrote her thesis on the violent nationalist group ETA versus the non-violent nationalist campaigns of the Catalan region in Spain. Pais Vasco has an extremely culturally rich as well as tragic history. The oldest European language, Euskara, is from there and developed independent of all other languages as no base language has been identified as one whose structure Euskara has adopted. During the Spanish Civil War, Franco chose Guernica, a tiny city in the region, to give to Hitler as a gift to test his Blitzkreig military strike concept, causing devasting life loss and destruction to a city that had done nothing do deserve it.

Getting now to the subject of this post, on my reading list is "Basque History of the World," written by Mark Kurlansky. I'm looking forward to learning more about their history and culture so that I have a better idea of who they are, and am not just thinking about them in terms of their connection to ETA.