Justin Calderon
A few steps from the entrance to the
Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, one of San Sebastian’s most visible
landmarks with its sky-piercing gothic spire, lies a simple, two-faced
earthen slab. In this corner of Spain’s Basque Country, it seems out of
place: carved on one side with an Apostolic cross and on the other with a
mysterious-looking, non-Latin alphabet.
The letters are certainly not Euskara,
also known as Basque, an enigmatic European language famous for the
absence of any clear links to living linguistic relatives. Rather, this
Armenian khachkar (a cross-bearing memorial stele) was placed
in central San Sebastian in 2017 by the city’s modern Armenian community
to commemorate the centennial of the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, which the Basque Country parliament is one of five parliaments in Spain to officially recognise.
When I first saw the Armenian khachkar, I had just arrived from Biarritz in French Basque Country, where the Association AgurArménie
(Armenian-Basque association) similarly trumpets a strong friendship
between the two ostensibly distinct groups. What’s more, as I clumsily
rolled past the memorial with suitcase in hand, I noted that San
Sebastian’s khachkar looked familiar. In the Basque Museum
in Bayonne, a short distance inland from Biarritz, I’d seen medieval
Basque funerary steles that bore artistic motifs with striking
similarities to the one in San Sebastian.
Was
this just coincidence? Many Armenians believe these similarities are
not. Contrary to the popular belief that Basques are a cultural island,
the Armenia-origin theory claims linguistic, toponymic, mythological and
even DNA links between Armenians and Basques. Though this theory goes
back centuries, it was most recently reinvigorated by Armenian linguist
Vahan Sargsyan, who published numerous books and studies on the subject,
including a first-ever Armenian-Basque dictionary in 2001.
It’s a topic not without controversy. The dominantly upheld theory by many Basques, including on their government tourism site,
is that their ethno-linguistic origin is isolated. This means their
language and DNA are unique – and is thought to derive directly from
hunter-gathers who came to this area long before Neolithic farming
entered the region 7,500 years ago.
However, in 2015, DNA testing
by population geneticist Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University in
Sweden put a dent into this theory when his team found strong DNA
matches between skeletons of Neolithic Iberian farmers, which date to
5,500 to 3,500 years ago, and modern day Basques, according to Science Magazine.
But the discovery hasn’t brought closure. The researchers also conceded
that they couldn’t “entirely rule out the possibility that Basque still
has its origins in a hunter-gatherer language that was retained and
carried along as farming spread throughout Iberia” – which leaves the
mystery unsolved.
What makes the Armenian-Basque theory intriguing
is that it has long been supported by linguistic research, first in an
article by British Basque linguist Edward Spencer Dodgson in 1884, and
then by studies from German philologist Joseph Karst in 1928, who
discovered more than 300 Basque-Armenian lexical, grammatical and
phonetic matches, including tegi (place), and zat (separate in Basque)/zati (separate in Armenian).
More
contemporarily, Sargsyan’s collaborative work in 1998 with Armenian and
Basque linguists identified almost 600-shared parallel words between
the two languages, which Sargsyan suggested were introduced through
metallurgy and farming via an ancient migration of Armenians to this
area. “It’s no accident that the Armenian and Basque languages have a
number of almost identical words relating to agriculture,” he wrote in a
2006 article in Yerevan Magazine, referring to the shared words ardi (sheep), urti (water-bearing) and gari (millet in Euskara; barley in Armenian).
I
was curious to test out the Armenian-Basque lexicon to see if it was
mutually intelligible, so I set out to question Euskara speakers on both
sides of the Spanish-French border.
From Bayonne to Bilbao, the Basque region, as
seen from several train seats, is a land of brilliant greenery that
traverses thick beds of grass and misty mountaintops. It is this land
that provided for early Basque pastoralists, and its long coastline for
fishermen, both of which are traditions still upheld strongly today.
While 90% of Spaniards live in big cities, making the country one of the
most depopulated in Europe, contrarily the majority of the Spanish
Basque Country’s more than two million people still live a rural or
suburban lifestyle.
This strong anchor to village life has created
numerous dialects, and in Basque public schools and institutions, a
standardised Euskara, called batua, is employed.
I
showed Manex Otegi, a San Sebastian native I met through my holiday
rental, a list of 26 shared Armenian-Basque words from Sargsyan’s
compilation. “It is Basque, but it’s a bit weird; it seems to be really
old,” he said, referring to the list. “Only six words on this list are
batua,” he added, pointing out the Armenian-Basque words zati (separate) and txar
(evil). “I’m not sure where they [others] come from and I guess that
the ones that I’m not familiar with is because they are very old and
maybe have been lost because the lack of use over the years and small
population.”
I repeated the same questioning with some Armenian
friends in Bayonne, who recognised just one word on the list, the word
for sheep (ardi), as an antiquated Armenian word.
Gauging from conversations on trains and pintxo
bars, and later with academics, it seems most shared Armenian-Basque
words are obsolete and no longer part of either modern language.
Unfortunately,
there are no known living speakers fluent in both languages, and
Sargsyan, who was self-taught in Euskara, passed away after a sudden
heart attack in 2011 at the age of 54. According to his daughter Arevik,
he left behind hundreds of flash cards of additional shared words,
which have yet to be published.
But how did two isolated
ethno-linguistic cultures share so many words with one another? Multiple
academics – both Armenian and Basque – including Basque linguist
Charles Videgain, kept pointing me to Bilbao, where the Euskaltzaindia (Royal Academy of the Basque Language) is located, to speak with the preeminent minds on the history of the Basque language.
In Bilbao, however, every scholar I spoke with
officially rejected any link between Basques and peoples from the
Caucasus (including Armenians or Georgians). Xabier Kintana, head
director at the Euskaltzaindia, told me that Sargsyan’s list of shared
Armenian-Basque words “are taken very randomly from the different modern
dialects of the Basque language” and “are surely old loans of Latin,
Celtic and other languages, in their time neighbours of the Basque,
which invalidates their comparison.”
He insisted that in order for
such a study to successfully find a shared origin, comparisons would
need to be made between the ancient forms of both languages. This would
strip away borrowings from other languages, both in the Basque case
(Latin, Iberian, Celtiberian, etc) and Armenian (Arabic, Turkish,
Syriac, etc). However, comparing ancient languages depends on often very
tiny sample sizes from archaeological digs, meaning getting a complete
picture is often impossible.
Even if a language connection is
found, ultimately solid physical evidence linking the two peoples is
absent. “The only relationship between these peoples is the similarity
of some words,” Basque archaeologist Mertxe Urteaga told me. “There is
no [archaeological] proof of the Armenian presence in the Basque Country
and Navarra.”
That left me back where I started, unable to
find proof of a link between the two ethnic groups, yet still not
convinced that two languages sharing hundreds of words could be pure
coincidence.
For now, it seems that Basque’s genesis story remains
one of Europe’s greatest enigmas; a rare treasure of discovery in a
world already largely charted, waiting for someone to finally crack it
open.
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