Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (42 page)

Memories of the former Crown of Aragon have in effect been carefully compartmentalized. People remember only what they want to remember. They suffer from a lack of benevolent but impartial concern; and quarrels can be easily provoked. In the 1980s, for example, when the province of Aragon was seeking a new flag for the post-Franco era, it adopted a design based on the medieval standard of the Crown of Aragon,
¹²⁵
where the Cross of St George is joined by the ‘four carmine bars on a field of gold’. In Zaragoza, the design no doubt felt perfectly innocent and appropriate. In Barcelona, it caused outrage.
¹²⁶
Protests and pamphlets proliferated. For, as every good Catalan knows, the ‘carmine and gold’ belongs exclusively to the national flag of Catalonia, the
Senyera
, that was awarded to Wilfred the Hairy more than a thousand years ago. As the legend goes, the hirsute warrior was lying wounded on the battlefield. The Emperor Louis dipped his fingers in the count’s own gore and drew four bloody stripes on the coverlet’s cloth-of-gold. Aragon, at the time, had yet to be born!
¹²⁷

Regional anthems aimed at restoring the identity of long neglected communities form another feature of post-Franco Spain. One might have expected a strong historical flavour, yet the lyrics adopted in provinces once belonging to the Crown of Aragon show little interest in the realities of the past. They may well be conditioned by animosities and inhibitions generated during the Civil War of 1936–9, and still not healed. As a result, they tend to reinforce the prevailing amnesia. In Catalonia, for example, ‘
Els Segadors
’, ‘The Reapers’, has been raised from a popular song to an official hymn. Composed in the nineteenth century to recall the insurrection of 1640, it breathes defiance against foreign domination, but has nothing to say about Catalonia’s former Aragonese partner:

Catalunya triomfant

Tornarà a ser rica i plena,

Endarrera aquesta gent

Tan ufana i tan superba
.

Bon cop de falç!

Bon cop de falç
,

Defensors de la terra!

Bon cop de falç!

(‘Triumphant Catalonia / will return to wealth and plenty, / and will drive out those people / so mean and arrogant. / A good sickle’s blow! / A good sickle’s blow, / oh defenders of the land! / A good sickle’s blow!’)
¹²⁸
One suspects that the Aragonese are now subsumed among ‘those mean and arrogant’ people.

In the Autonomous Community of Aragon, the official
Himno
combines an old melody with modern words, praising ‘the flowers of our fields’, ‘the snowy peaks of our mountains’, and the hopes and dreams for a future of freedom and justice. Yet its highly poetic lines contain not a single historical echo of the Crown of Aragon’s ancient past:

Luz de Aragón, torre al viento, campana de soledad!

Que tu afán propague, río sin frontera, tu razón, tu verdad!

Vencedor de tanto olvido, memoria de eternidad,

Pueblo del tamaño de hombres y mujeres, i Aragón, vivirás!

(‘Light of Aragon, Tower in the Wind, Bell of Solitude! / Your confidence will spread, a river without bounds: so, too, your reason, your truth! / Victor over so much oblivion, memory of eternity, / a people of so many men and women, Aragon, you will live!’)
¹²⁹

In Valencia, they still sing a
Himno
which has not changed since the regional Valencian Exhibition of 1909. Many consider the words to be redundant, but a recording made in 2008 by Plácido Domingo in both Castilian and Valencian has restored the anthem’s fortunes:

Per ofrenar noves glòries a Espanya,

Tots a una veu, germans, vingau.

Ja en el taller i en el camp remoregen

Càntics d’amor, himnes de pau!

Nostra Senyera!

Glória a la Pátria! Visca Valencia!

Visca! Visca! Visca!

(‘To offer up new glories to Spain / all with one voice, brothers, gather around. / In the workshops and in the fields / songs of love already resound, and hymns of peace. / Our Lady! Glory to the Fatherland, Long live Valencia! Viva! Viva! Viva!’)
¹³⁰

And in Mallorca, the authorities have adopted a charming but incongrous song about a spider:

La Balanguera misteriosa,

Com una aranya d’art subtil,

Buida que buida sa filiosa,

De nostra vida treu el fil.

Com una parca bé cavilla,

Tixint la tela per demà.

La balanguera fila, fila,

La balanguera filerà.

(‘The mysterious Balanguera, / like a subtle and artistic spider, / empties and empties her distaff, / and draws out the thread of our lives. / Like fate she ponders well, / weaving the cloth for tomorrow. / The Balanguera spins and spins, / the Balanguera will always spin.’)
¹³¹

The musical landscape in Perpignan is necessarily rather different. The French Region of Languedoc-Roussillon has so far resisted the temptation of commissioning an official anthem. But several songs circulate as rousing examples of local patriotism. At
USA
Perpignan
, they roar out the lines of ‘
L’Estaca
’, ‘The Stake’.
*
In the bars and in the backstreets of the festivals, the
Montanyes Regalades
or the
Montanyes de Canigou
float gently on the evening air. But the crowds predominantly speak French, and it is the French words of ‘
Le Hymne à la Catalogne
’ that constitute the most frequent refrain:

Perpignan, Perpignan,

Chante, chante les catalanes.

Perpignan, Perpignan,

Danse, danse la Sardane!

(‘Perpignan, Perpignan, / sing, sing to the Catalan girls. / Perpignan, Perpignan, / dance, dance the
sardane
!’)
¹³²

Sometimes, it seems, history can best be invoked by dispassionate outsiders. Concluding his description of the Crown of Aragon, a foreign scholar strikes a note of serene resignation: ‘The old stones are quiet now. They tell… of fighting and protecting and exploiting: of rural toil and herding: of praying and endowing: of trading and talking, and of links and aspirations across sunny seas.’
¹³³

*
The name ‘Aragon’, like nearby ‘Aran’, is usually linked etymologically to the Basque word for ‘valley’. In modern Basque it is ‘Aragoa’. The territory from which the river springs was variously known in the earliest times either as Aragon after the river or as Jaca after its only sizeable settlement. In the same way, the adjacent territory to the west was variously known either as Navarra after the Basque word for ‘plain’ or as Pamplona after its only city. The clear implication is that Basques once lived far beyond their modern limits.

*
The House of Barcelona adopted the custom of alternating the names of the counts in each generation in order to distinguish fathers from sons. Hence the son and heir of Berenguer Ramón I became Ramón Berenguer I (r. 1035–76). When the latter’s countess gave birth
c
. 1053 to twin sons, therefore, the problem was solved by calling the elder twin Ramón Berenguer and the younger one Berenguer Ramón. In due course when the twins succeeded their father, Ramón Berenguer II ruled in uneasy tandem with his brother, Berenguer Ramón II El Fratricida. The sole rule of the surviving twin came about through the death of his brother in a suspicious hunting accident, very similar to that of their contemporary, William Rufus of England.

*
The Catalans, because of their former subjection to Frankish overlordship, were still identified here as Franks.

*
‘
L’Estaca
’ is a liberation song from the Franco era, composed in 1968 by the Catalan singer, Lluís Llach. It became popular in many countries, not least in Poland, where an adaptation by Jacek Kaczmarski – ‘
Mury
’, ‘The Walls’ – caught on as the unofficial anthem of the Solidarity movement; anti-Fascist sentiments inspired anti-Communist lyrics. The key stanza reads: ‘Wyrwij mury żeby krat, / Zerwij kajdany, polam bat. / A mury runa˛, runa˛, runa˛ / i pogrzebia˛ stary świat’ (‘Tear down the bars of the cage, / Snap the chains, and break the lash. / The walls will crumble, crumble, crumble / And hasten the old world’s crash’).

Litva

A Grand Duchy with Kings

(1253–1795)

I

Belarus does not attract visitors. There are so few of them that the country fails to feature in the published International Tourism Rankings. One might be tempted to think that there is little to see, nothing of interest and no history worth mentioning. Yet Belarus, which for most of the twentieth century was known to the outside world as Byelorussia, is not boring; nor is it tiny or geographically remote. Its area of 81,000 square miles is similar to that of Scotland, Kansas or Minnesota, and prior to 1991 put it in sixth position among the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union. Its population, 10.4 million in 2007, is similar to that of Belgium, Portugal or Greece, Michigan or Pennsylvania: it is only one-third the size of its southern neighbour, Ukraine, but larger than the three Baltic States put together. Since 2004 it has been bordered by three states of the European Union, which in large part are separated by Belarus from its giant eastern neighbour, Russia. The capital Miensk, or Minsk, lies on Europe’s main east–west railway line between Paris, Berlin and Moscow, or can be reached by direct flights from London Heathrow in around three hours.
¹

Low-lying and landlocked – surrounded by Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine and Russia – Belarus has many rivers but no mountains. Its highest point at Dzyarzhynska Hara or ‘Dzherzhynsky Hill’ reaches a mere 1,132 feet (346 metres). Its main physical axis runs from south-west to north-east across the great European plain and along a section of the continental divide. All the rivers above the divide, the Nyoman (Nieman) and Dvina and their tributaries, flow to the Baltic; all rivers below the divide, like the Pripyat’ and Berezina, flow south towards the Dniepr and the Black Sea.

The country’s problems, patently severe, can best be summarized by four ‘I’s – Infrastructure, Image, Irradiation and, above all,
Istoriia
. As a showpiece of the infrastructure, the Belarusian tourist industry can recommend no hotels in the higher international categories, no scenic routes served by modern roads and service stations, and no holiday resorts. Furthermore, despite some stunning tracts of primeval forest, this cannot be described as unspoiled territory.