Basques

• 1. Introduction

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  Basques are one of Western Europe's most enduring puzzles. Strabo, writing somewhere between 20 BC and 20 AD, noticed something unsettling about the people north of the Ebro: women could inherit property and officiate in churches, a custom he called 'a sort of woman-rule -- not at all a mark of civilization.' Strabo had stumbled onto a group that did not fit neatly into the Roman world, and the centuries that followed only deepened that strangeness. Who are these people, and where did they come from? How does a language survive ice ages, Roman legions, Frankish pressure, and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco? And what pulls millions of their descendants, scattered from Boise, Idaho to the silver mines of Bolivia, back toward a country that sits astride a mountain range shared between Spain and France?

• 2. A Language Unlike Any Other

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  Euskara, the Basque language, belongs to no known language family. Every other major language spoken in Europe traces back to Proto-Indo-European roots; Basque does not. Linguists call it a genetic isolate, meaning it has no proven relatives anywhere on earth. Scholars believe it has probably been spoken continuously in its present territory for longer than most modern European languages have existed. That staying power came under severe pressure during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, when cultural activity in Basque was formally restricted to folkloric matters and the Catholic Church. Knowledge of the language declined for years under that official persecution. By the time the Franco era ended, the language had nearly vanished from the major urban centers of Pamplona, Bilbao, and Bayonne. A recovery followed. Favorable official language policies and popular support reversed that decline, and today roughly 33 percent of the population in the Basque Autonomous Community speaks the language. In the French Basque Country, however, Basque lacks official recognition entirely, and attempts to introduce bilingualism in local administration have met direct refusal from French officials. What the language survives on, in part, is the identity it carries: Basques call themselves the euskaldunak, meaning 'those who have Basque,' and their homeland Euskal Herria, 'country of the Basque language.' The nationalist activist Sabino Arana, working in the late 19th century, coined the neologism Euzkadi for an independent Basque nation composed of seven historical territories; in its regularized spelling Euskadi, that word is now the official name of the Basque Autonomous Community.

• 3. Origins and Ancestry

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  Coins minted somewhere near Pamplona in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC bear the inscription barscunes, the earliest hard evidence of a distinct Basque-area population in writing. The ancient Vascones and Aquitanians, mentioned by Strabo and Pliny, are considered ancestors of the Basques, and genetic studies have confirmed a real distinctiveness, though Basque Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA sequences remain broadly European and are widespread along the western fringe of the continent. For much of the 20th century, researchers theorized the Basques were descendants of the original Cro-Magnon people, an idea tied to the pre-Indo-European character of their language and their unusual scores on classical genetic markers such as blood groups. More recent analysis complicated that picture. Basques are genetically distinctive partly due to isolation, but they are not outliers in every measure. The popular framing of Basques as living fossils of earliest European humanity is appealing but overstated. What persists, however, is a broadly held belief among Basques themselves that their language carries continuity with people who inhabited this region not just before Rome and before the Celts, but since the Stone Age.

• 4. Self-Government and Its Losses

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  Vasconia, the loosely defined territory between the Ebro and Garonne rivers, spent the Early Middle Ages fending off pressure from Visigothic kingdoms and Arab rulers to the south and Frankish expansion from the north. By the turn of the first millennium, it had fragmented into feudal regions: Soule, Labourd, and the Kingdom of Pamplona among them. The Kingdom of Pamplona, later known as Navarre, became the central Basque realm, but Castile severed its coastline by conquering key western territories between 1199 and 1201, leaving the kingdom landlocked. Internal strife called the War of the Bands, partisan conflicts between local ruling families, further weakened Navarre, and the bulk of the realm fell to Spanish armies between 1512 and 1524. The territory north of the Pyrenees stayed beyond Spanish reach; Lower Navarre became a province of France in 1620. Despite these pressures, the Basques retained substantial self-governing institutions on both sides of the Pyrenees until the French Revolution in 1790 and the Carlist Wars of 1839 and 1876. In those conflicts, Basques supported heir apparent Carlos V and his descendants, and after losing, they forfeited the native laws and institutions of the Ancien regime. In France, the three historic provinces of Labourd, Lower Navarre, and Soule were absorbed into the national department system beginning in 1790. A separate Basque department within France has never been established, though by recent count, 63.87 percent of mayors in the French Basque region support creating one. A partial step came in January 2017, when a single agglomeration community was established for the French Basque Country.

• 5. A Diaspora of Conquistadors and Cowboys

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  Basque inheritance customs pushed many younger children out into the world. Ancient law recognized in the fueros favored primogeniture, with land passing to the eldest child, male or female, as a single intact holding. Younger siblings had to make their living by other means, and after industrialization, many left for Spain, France, and the Americas. The list of those who went and made their names is striking: the explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado was Basque, as was Lope de Aguirre, and Juan Sebastián Elcano, who completed the first circumnavigation of the globe after Ferdinand Magellan died mid-journey. The Chilean historian Luis Thayer Ojeda estimated that 48 percent of immigrants to Chile in the 17th and 18th centuries were Basque. Estimates for Basque descendants in Chile alone range between 2.5 and 5 million. In Bolivia, competition over the silver mines of Potosí sparked a conflict called the War of the Vicuñas and Basques, which lasted from June 1622 to March 1625. The Basques had tried to monopolize control of the municipal government of Potosí and the silver mining sector; their rivals, non-Basque Spaniards who went by the informal name 'Vicuñas' after their habit of wearing hats made of vicuña skins, first used legal measures, then armed force. Place names across the Americas still carry Basque roots: Nueva Vizcaya, now Chihuahua and Durango in Mexico; New Navarre, now Sonora and Sinaloa; Biscayne Bay in the United States; and Aguereberry Point, also in the United States. In North America today, the largest Basque community is concentrated around Boise, Idaho, home to the Basque Museum and Cultural Center and a diaspora festival held every five years. Reno, Nevada, hosts the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada. Bakersfield, California's Noriega's restaurant won the 2011 James Beard Foundation America's Classic Award.

• 6. Faith, Mythology, and Mari

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  Scholars disagree sharply about when Christianity actually took hold in the Basque Country. Early traces appear in major urban areas from the 4th century onward, and a bishopric was established in Pamplona in 589. Hermit cave concentrations in Álava and Navarre were in use from the 6th century. But the Encyclopaedia Britannica places Christianization as late as the 10th century and notes that earlier animism survives in Basque folklore. That older belief system centered on a goddess called Mari. Place names across the Basque Country carry her name, indicating sites of worship. One tradition holds that Mari traveled every seven years between a cave on Mount Anboto and another mountain, with weather turning wet when she resided in Anboto and dry when she moved to Aloña, Supelegor, or Gorbea. Her consort was Sugaar, and when the two gathered in the high caves of the sacred peaks, they were said to engender storms. Their meetings typically fell on Friday nights. Basque legend also populated the world with jentilak, a race of giants representing a Stone Age people displaced by ironworkers, and with lamiak, described as nymphs, along with iratxoak, sorginak, and a trickster figure named San Martin Txiki, or 'St Martin the Lesser.' One jentil named Olentzero accepted Christianity and became a kind of Basque Santa Claus. The region's Catholic legacy is equally remarkable: Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, was Basque. Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuits, came from the same people. Fermín Lasuén, born in Vitoria, succeeded Junípero Serra and founded 9 of the 21 extant California Missions. Father Alberto Hurtado, a Jesuit priest born in 1901, founded the charitable housing system Hogar de Cristo in Chile; he was beatified by Pope John Paul II on the 16th of October 1994 and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on the 23rd of October 2005.

• 7. Sport and Daily Life

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  Basque rural sports grew directly from the labor that shaped the landscape. Stone-lifting competitions called harri-jasotzea began in quarry work. Aizkolaritza, or wood-chopping, and trontzalaritza, log sawing, derived from forestry. The sport of txinga eramatea, carrying heavy weights in both hands to represent milk canisters, and idi probak, stone block pulling with teams of oxen, both replicated farm and construction tasks. Fishermen's rowing regattas, called estropadak, carry the same working-life origin. The great Basque ball game tradition, known generically as pilota or pelota, has traveled far beyond the Pyrenees; some variants are played in the United States and Macau under the name Jai Alai. Football clubs within the Basque Country include Athletic Bilbao, which refuses to sign any player who is not Basque by ethnicity or Basque academy training, and Real Sociedad, which once held the same policy. In the 2016-17 La Liga season, five Basque clubs competed simultaneously at the top level of Spanish football for the first time. Saski Baskonia of Vitoria-Gasteiz ranks among the 11 clubs holding stakes in Euroleague Basketball. The professional cycling team partly sponsored by the Basque Government competed in the UCI World Tour division until 2014. Miguel Indurain, born in Villava-Atarrabia, won five consecutive Tours de France. Basque cuisine, meanwhile, has its own institution: the txoko, a gastronomical society where men gather to cook and share food, a 20th-century feature of cultural life. Until recently, women were admitted to these clubs only one day per year.