Returning to San Sebastian

And Some of Its People's Quest For A Land Of Their Own. As In Prague

San Sebastian, or Donosti in Basque, was rainy and cold when I was there. All the more beautiful. This is its famous Playa de La Concha.

The history of the nations east of France and Germany— including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, and the former members of Yugoslavia—was pretty vague to me for a long time. I can blame that schooling in the United States focuses more on England, France, Scotland and Ireland, where our cultural and political roots are more.

But living in Prague for two years (2021-2023) helped better acquaint me with the storylines of the Czech Republic, the nation Prague is in, as well as its neighbors. Those storylines can be reduced to two words: Nationalism, and Empire.

These countries in Eastern and Central Europe were part of multi-ethnic, multi-lingual empires—mostly the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which stretched from parts of Poland down to the Balkan states, and the Russian Empire, which took in Poland, Ukraine, and other now-freestanding nations.

The struggles of these people to have their own countries, with their own institutions, was largely a good and necessary one—even though, arguably, World War I might not have started if a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, hadn’t assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in 1914. That was a stupid thing to do, in my estimation, and not just because it triggered a world war.

It took not just one but two world wars to show that nations work best when grouped around common ethnicities and cultures—and more specifically, languages. (And that empires are or should be a thing of the past.) Multilingual nations have a hard time of it and only work when they’re quite small and can take enormous care in assuaging the egos of their respective components. (See Switzerland, which has three official languages students are required to study: German, French, and Italian.)

After World War I, the borders of Europe were adjusted—but the peoples not so much.

After World War II, not just the borders but the peoples were moved, as Tony Judt writes about in his history of modern Europe. Europe was “ethnically cleansed,” to use an impolite word, or “ethnically tidied up.” Mostly, the Germans were pushed out of Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia into what is now present-day Germany. Greeks being pushed out of Turkey and vice versa in 1923 was in some respects a model and precedent for these actions. These nations today don’t work perfectly, but they work better for having common languages.

But here’s the rub: languages and nations are not just found; they are, like news stories, made.

Look at any nation, and you find certain parts of their stories are emphasized, sometimes even myths or fables. The languages themselves aren’t just picked up off the ground, so to speak. They were cultivated and shaped. Leaders made efforts to convert spoken languages into written ones and have them taught in schools.

All this came to mind because last week I dipped my toes into spicy waters of nationalism when I visited the San Telmo Museum in San Sebastian—or Donosti, as the Basques prefer to call it. I was there visiting an old friend, Phil, who goes regularly for work. He and I actually met in this city in 1982, when I wandered up to Donosti after six months in a study-abroad program in Salamanca. In Donosti/San Sebastian, I initially made a living singing on the street. That’s a story for another day. I will say it was a pretty bourgeois busker life. With the money I earned playing for two hours on Friday, two on Saturday, and twice on Sunday, I made enough to pay rent on the apartment my girlfriend and I shared a block from the city’s beautiful, horseshoe-shaped beach, the Playa de la Concha. Plus food, and going out to eat. Pretty nice lifestyle.

In all my time there, I never even noticed the San Telmo Museum, which sits on the edge of the old town, the city’s medieval quarter. My priorities must have been different. This time, I noticed it quickly after I typed “museums” into Google Maps on my iPhone. With some time to kill one morning, Phil and I went.

I was so impressed. I had expected some thin, self-congratulatory exhibits.. Instead, we found two buildings, one old and one new, with deep dives into Basque history and culture, packed with significant artifacts.

The old building was a former convent with a giant cathedral-like nave. In the early 1900s it had been converted into a museum about the Basque people. (I wonder how and why the Catholic Church gave up a building to become a secular museum? I didn’t know that happened back then.)

The high walls in the nave, and around where the pulpit had been, had been painted with giant murals telling the story of the Basque people. Completed or perhaps commissioned in 1929, they were epic in scale and storyline—depicting whalers, fishermen, shepherds, miners and more. They were the most impressive part of the San Telmo museum, for me. One mural showed a Spanish king in medieval times pledging to respect Basque autonomy. This must have been heady stuff in the 1920s. A quick Google search reminded me that the Spanish Republic didn’t begin until 1931, and the monarchy still reigned before then. Yet it allowed this temple of Basque nationalism to come about?

These murals flashed me back to Prague. There, you can see giant murals—20 of them—done by the painter Mucha. Titled The Slav Epic, they were completed in 1926 after decades of work, about the same time as the Basque paintings. Clearly, art can be political. The canvases were a rallying cry for the Slavic people to unite and have lands of their own. It’s no accident they were finished during the brief life of Czechoslovakia, then only a decade old, born from the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I.

And a thousand miles away, the Basques were laboring toward their own dreams of autonomy and, ideally, their own country.

In the 1980s, when I was there, this included ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), the Basque terrorist group that blew up banks and killed people, working with its political arm, Herri Batasuna—doubtless helping keep my rent cheap on that apartment near the beach.

The desire for a country of one’s own is a double-edged sword. ETA arguably had a right to armed struggle under Franco, the dictator who suppressed the Basque language. But under a democracy? I don’t think so.

Ukraine, a country of Slavic people, is now trying to hold onto its independence from another Slavic nation: Russia. So ethnicity doesn’t explain—or solve—everything.

José María Sert painted the murals in San Telmo museum. He was a prominent painter from a prosperous Barcelona family. A quick google showed me Sert was the uncle of another Sert I knew about: Josep L. Sert, dean starting in the 1950s of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where I did a Loeb Fellowship in 1999-2000.

Sert the architect fascinated me, because while at Harvard I read some of his writings, and was struck by how literate and perceptive he was. I also got to know some of his work. He not only dean of the Design school while at Harvard, he was chairman of the Cambridge Planning Commission. With his projects for the city and urban design vision, Sert, in my opinion, screwed up this Colonial-era city. Sert ploughed new highways and boulevards through the middle of it, and put in car-oriented buildings, rather than keeping its streets and buildings more pedestrian. Sert to me became an example of how good, smart, perceptive people can do bad things, based on bad or incomplete ideas.

So it was fascinating to come across his uncle. Both Serts came from a prosperous and artistically-inclined family.

And the Serts were Catalans of Catalonia, the region around Barcelona that has its own nationalist movement, one that Spain is still struggling with. Interesting that the Basques in the 1920s reached out to a Catalan painter and not a Basque one.

When I lived in the Basque Country, for about a year and a half in total, I came away with great respect for the Basque people. How remarkable that they preserved and revived an Indo-European language unrelated to any other! Today, Basque children are educated in both Basque and Spanish. A friend of Phil’s, an Englishman, has two grown sons who were educated in San Sebastian and they are fluent in Basque, Spanish, and English.

At the same time, I’m aware of the kind of smugness and reverse parochialism that sometimes comes with a strong emphasis on Basque identity. And where does nationalism stop? There are, incredibly, four different dialects of Basque, if memory serves. Should they be separate nations too? In Czechia, you have Moravia and Bohemia—also with distinct dialects and cultures. When do you stop drilling down?

Again, I come back to this idea that languages and cultures aren’t only found—they’re made. Basque culture and language thrive today because its proponents won a political victory. The same is true of the Jewish people and the supporters of Israel, who turned Hebrew from an archaic language into a living one of the street. And as I wrote about in The Surprising Design of Market Economies, the creation and support of an American version of English was part of the effort to create a unified, separate nation distinct from England.

The drive by Basques to be their own country has largely been laid aside, I believe. Still, the Basques wrestle I am pretty sure with being part of a larger nation that in their view has different roots.

So those are a few thoughts on nationalism, language, culture and borders, triggered by my quite pleasant visit to the city of San Sebastian, where I lived, long ago.

Tummy Time: Basque Cuisine vs. Portuguese

I’d actually meant to talk more about how beautiful San Sebastian is. You have these lovely urban streets wrapped around a horseshoe-shaped beach, and a culture of going out, eating pinchos (or tapas), and socializing. Clearly, one could live very well here, provided you had some money. San Sebastian, cheap when I was there in the 1980s, is now often ranked the most expensive city in Spain. Though prices today seemed okay to me, at least for food.

I didn’t eat at any of the city’s many Michelin-starred restaurants, but even in casual dining, I can say Basque (or Spanish) cuisine aspires to be more complex. Portuguese food aims to be simple. Spanish chefs often put some spin on the ball.

For example, at a nicer menu del día spot, I had as a first course of leaves of radicchio with ham, cheese, and sauce; followed by salt cod with a rich, multi-part sauce. It was good.

In comparison with Portugal, in Spain, you have a menu of the day, (not a plate) and the fixed price includes a large first course, a large second course, dessert, and wine or beer—for 18 to 20 euros, at least in San Sebastian. In Portugal, it’s usually just a main course and drink, for 8 to 12 euros.

I enjoyed Basque and Spanish food. But I’ve come to appreciate Portuguese simplicity, which trains your palate to recognize nuance in the unadorned. Just yesterday, the older man at a table next to mine was praising carapau, or horse mackerel, because this time of year they often carry sacs of fat roe—delicious, he said. The way the Portuguese prepare most fish, simply and cleanly, showcases that.

While I saw fish and seafood in San Sebastian, I didn’t see as many varieties as where I live now.

My time in San Sebastian sparked other cross-border and cross-culture comparisions. Here in Odemira County, I’ve come to love pig ear salad. It’s pieces of pig ear, each about the size of a quarter, grilled and cooled, then mixed with garlic, olive oil, vinegar, salt, and fresh cilantro. I first ordered it on a dare—and then grew to love it.

So in Donosti, when Phil’s friend Gabriela, a local, said the bar we were in did a great version of pig ear, I ordered it. It was really good—and totally different from the dish in Portugal. Instead of a cold salad, it was a large grilled or broiled chunk, with spicy stuff on top. Delicious, though quite fatty.