Some of my work takes me regularly into Donostia's neighborhood of Egia, which is also Basque for "truth." The neighborhood itself is not especially distinctive, but it has a couple of my favorite spaces in the city: the municipal Polloe cemetery and
Cristina Enea Park. The cemetery, which is vast and opens a peephole into the city's posh and contested history, dates back to the early 1800s and is more gothic than Morrissey. The park houses a biodiversity foundation and is bordered by the
tabakalera, which is on its way to becoming a hip exhibition space, or will once it has a ceiling. Here are some pics from a recent stroll around the area.
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| To be clear: this is not a church. This is a mausoleum. There are several of these monsters in the older section of Polloe to commemorate eminent families of whom I am ignorant. |
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| Detail from a different mausoleum. |
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| Magnolia blossoms (in February!) by the Cristina Enea foundation, which is home to turtles, waterfowl, and peacocks. |
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| Usually, the family of the deceased is responsible for maintaining gravesites. Several of the elaborate mausoleums at Polloe were missing their stained glass or had broken masonry, maybe because they had no family left in the area. |
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| One border of Cristina Enea. |
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| Tabakalera. |
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| Some of the more ordinary tombstones in Polloe. |
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| This monument reads "To the memory of those killed for defending the ideals of God and Spain, a prayer for their souls." It seemed fishily Spanish nationalistic in the midst of a neighborhood that has been a bastion of "euskaldunization," meaning a place that actively teaches and enforces the use of the Basque language. Lo and behold, a political party requested that this monument be changed because it apparently memorializes the people who died in support of Francisco Franco's coup, which successfully toppled the nascent Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War, leading to decades of dictatorship and the suppression of the Basque language. The monument does not appear to have been changed, and it stands in a neglected corner of the cemetery without much apparent attention. |
