23/05/25
Beyond political earthquakes, differences and the noise of the modern world, there is something that beats in that land we call Basque. Something much bigger and deeper than any politics, and even any culture.
The first time I climbed the Jata, a 600-meter mountain that dominates the coast of Bermeo, rising directly from the sea, I realized that in its surroundings there were some rocks brought there by human hands. When I read the inscription I learned that it was megalithic art, part of a complex that extends through the valleys and peaks of the area.
And the Basque Country, long before the words people or culture existed, was a magical place, one of the first settlements of Homo Sapiens, and perhaps Neanderthals at the same time, in Europe.
Since then, and in many peaks of the territory, I have found these dolmens, stones arranged in a circle or rising a few meters above the ground, marking a need to exist and transcend in silence.
The language that would come later is almost as old and lost in time as these first settlers, and makes us feel that we walk in a millenary legacy, a land that has seen the pain, the joy and the emotion of the human being for a very long time.
Are we different, unique? Looking at this stone art, what is clear is that we were and can be one with nature, whether it is called Basque or not. That honours it, fills it with invisible magic, that no one can dominate, only feel.
If every culture is destined to die, from the Minoans of Crete, Magna Greece, the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Celts...the Basque culture will be no different.
But even without culture, hardly any people left the sea swallowing some peaks, that ancestral wave of nature will still remain, because then and now, we are the same. The Basques, without knowing that they were such, showed it to us. In the silence of a sea and a mountain view.
Ignacio F.A.A
