Paddy Woodworthwas seduced when he first visited the border-straddling region, in the 1970s. He explains how he fell in love with it
ITZIAR WAS THE first Basque village I saw. Its enormous church swung abruptly into view, set high on a hill above the road, as I was hitch-hiking from San Sebastián to Bilbao on my first day in the Basque Country, in September 1975.
Those were stirring times. The old dictator Gen Franco lay dying in Madrid, still signing death warrants as if the execution of his enemies might somehow further postpone his own wretched and lingering departure. A great wave of democracy was waiting to break over Spain, but the heavily armed police at checkpoints I had passed along the road were a reminder that change would not come easily.
The noisy and overheated political side of my brain suddenly went completely silent, however, when I was dropped off on the old main road, which ran between Itziar and the sea.
I thought the great Gothic church above me was like a stone ship anchored to the steep green hillside. I thought this was an original thought until I found years later that it was a commonplace in Basque writing.
That day other images seduced me: a brace of oxen, their chunky wooden yoke blazing with woollen decorations in primary colours, and the wiry man in blue overalls and a black beret urging them on, almost pushing them up the slope; the tang of freshly cut young bracken, the sweeter smell of mown grass; and, everywhere and yet nowhere in particular, the echoing of sheep bells. Itziar became my image of a Basque pastoral Eden.
Two years passed before I returned to the same spot. It was an exceptionally bright June day when I turned off the main road and took the long sweeping S-bends up to the village. The great white farmhouses with their sloping red roofs gleamed with a brilliance that made it seem for a moment as though we were in another country, more north African than Basque. And it was Sunday lunchtime, so not a soul was stirring outside these family homes. But it was far from silent in the shimmering heat.
In one of these centennial farmsteads someone was playing Pink Floyd's drug-fuelled Wish You Were Here at full volume. Oddly, it did not seem entirely inappropriate to the setting.
I wandered off through woods that dipped up and down towards the townland of Lastur. On a steep slope I suddenly came upon a little bull - a very little bull. I thought it was rather comic when it started tossing its head aggressively, but I stopped laughing when it charged. I climbed a tree very fast. The bull gave me a glance of bored contempt, paused for a moment, then dashed off.
Looking back during the years that followed, I sometimes wondered if the whole day had been a dream, blending a bizarre mixture of nostalgia for student psychedelia and a childhood fear of cattle. Despite, or because of, this visit Itziar remained as remote and desirable as ever.
About 10 years later I began reading Joseba Zulaika's landmark Basque Violence: Metaphor and Sacrament. I was amazed and disturbed to find that Itziar, of all places, was the object of a masterpiece of anthropological fieldwork. The book also tells the story of the author's youth at a time of great crisis - which happened to be precisely the time I had first seen the village. It contained much stranger, more wonderful and more terrible things than I had imagined.
Zulaika made vivid the nearby caves, with their masterpieces of Neolithic cave painting, which hint at ancient Basque forebears. His mother had seen the Basque goddess Mari flying like a ball of fire through the sky. The old ways were already fading in Zulaika's youth, but even as an adult he could still interview someone who saw, quite clearly, a witch sitting beside his tape recorder, in broad daylight.
The social world of Itziar in the 1970s was equally strange and more tangibly dangerous. Though he had not known it at the time, Zulaika's youthful companions had included an active service unit from the armed Basque separatist group Eta. This organisation was even more secretive than the IRA. Many people in Itziar admired Eta at this time, because the group was giving the dictatorship, which had treated their culture and civil liberties with contempt for 40 years, a very bloody nose.
Yet they were deeply shocked to find that Eta existed in their midst and that its use of violence could blight Basque lives as well as those of Spanish police and politicians. Four of their own local teenagers had kidnapped a Basque businessman for ransom; after sharing many sociable meals with him in an isolated farmhouse, they had shot him in the head. Orders from above: his family failed to pay up.
The village, Zulaika wrote, encompassed many other worlds. There was a rich living tradition of oral poetry in the unique Basque language, Euskera, and of distinctive rural sports such as rock-lifting. There was also a disco where the callow sex-and-drugs lifestyle was much the same as in Madrid or Minneapolis.
When I finally met Zulaika, in 2003, I told him about my dream day in Itziar. He could explain it all. His brother Xalbador, who has since died, was a big Pink Floyd fan and always played their music very loud in their home. And Lastur, it turned out, is famous for its puny but pugnacious bulls.
Today, another of Zulaika's brothers, Bixente, is struggling to bring the outlying community of Lastur back to life. Its tiny scattering of houses now forms an extended restaurant and hostel, which enclose two sides of an earth arena.
Here, the little bulls again do battle with youths, in the Basque style, on Saturday afternoons. This is a kind of burlesque bull-fighting, in which the animals are taunted but rarely harmed physically. It's very popular with stag parties from nearby towns.
Bixente knows the intimate history behind every faded photograph in his restaurant: the bohemian-tragic life of the itinerant accordion players of the 1940s; the brilliant but alcoholic folk healer who lost his own daughters to typhus he had carried back into his home; the rock-lifter whose record has never been broken.
He jealously guards the authenticity of the old rituals and has made them live again in happier times. Leading poets come to chant extemporaneous verses at communal meals; champion rock-lifters and lumber-cutters perform at fiestas; young people dance to the accordion, switching comfortably from folk steps to rock rhythms, without fear of opprobrium from the Basque clergy, who regarded all social dancing as potentially sinful in the past.
Itziar and its townlands today, and yesterday, are a far cry from the garden of Eden I had once imagined them to be. But now I somehow feel at home there, and perhaps that makes the village a kind of fragile paradise.
Paddy Woodworth's most recent book, The Basque Country: A Cultural History, is available in paperback, Signal Books, £12 in UK
Go there
Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) flies several times a week from Dublin and Shannon to Biarritz, in the French Basque Country, about 90 minutes' drive from Itziar. Aer Lingus (www.aerlingus. com) flies to Bilbao, 30 minutes from Itziar, from March to October each year.