Not all sunshine and sangria

For sometime now I have been thinking that I should write a more serious entry in this blog from time to time, just to show that a) I can and b) the Spanish sunshine has not turned my brain too much and c) we are not obsessed with food. The 18th July is the 70th anniversay of the start of the Spanish Civil War, so this seems as good a time as any.

To tell the truth, I would not have realised the date had I not been reading The Times Online over the weekend. They had a piece about a commemorative event organised in London by the British contingent of the International Brigade, volunteers who came to Spain to fight on the Republican side against the Nationalist rebels, soon to be led to victory by General Franco. Apparently, this is an annual event, but this year, for the first time, a representative of the Spanish Government will be present.

So what? Not so newsworthy, you might think. After all, the event has been taking place in London, not Madrid, all these years. The point is that, up until recently, official silence in Spain was the norm in relation to anything to do with the Civil War and the Francoist repression that continued until the General died peacefully in his bed in 1975. Most of the serious histories of the period have been written by British historians like Anthony Beevor and Hugh Thomas, rather than by Spaniards. It wasn't until 2000 that the first victims were dug up from a roadside grave, and then only due to the persistence of a young journalist who wanted to find out what had happened to his grandfather. Since then 500 bodies have been recovered, although they reckon there are more than 300,000 more killed by the Nationalists, as well as 50,000 by the Republicans-although they, of course, have their memorial in the Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen) near Madrid.

Now things seem to be changing quite rapidly. The international best-selling book 'Soldiers of Salamis' by Javier Cercas (a huge success in Spain, a country which doesn't have a tradition of reading books), which desribes an incident of unusual humanity in what was a bloody conflict, has contributed to an awakening of awareness . The Spanish Prime Minister, Zapatero, whose grandfather was shot by nationalists, has declared 2006 "The Year of Historical Memory" and has pledged to recover and open up archives. Meanwhile, various grassroots organisations have been set up to discover and excavate the sites of these roadside graves. I have noticed too, that there have been various articles in the Spanish press recently, all of them ( those that I have read) very careful to avoid hyperbole. And the Spanish Ambassador attends a memorial event for the International Brigade in London.

It will be interesting to see what Tuesday brings. But isn't it extraordinary, and a real measure of the fear of re-opening old wounds, that this extroverted nation should have held its collective tongue for so long?