On August 1, a dozen people from the family were in Aranguren. Two young people from Aranzadi made firsthand the excavations and works being carried out in Irulegi. This visit is highly recommended, as it reflects the dimension of the work they are doing.

Halfway, at the first stop, the Aranzadi people asked us if we had ever been to Aranguren or if we knew it. I told him that I had never been there, but that I knew the valley for the neighbors’ struggle against landfill. The young man of Aranzadi confirms this (he had not created it in those years) and says that "thanks" to this struggle the City of Aranguren met and the community was formed. This community has supported the excavations in Irulegi. The Government of Navarra has not participated in the financing.

First awe and first thought: Why? You are also aware of the answer.

Before reaching the castle of Irulegi, we knew the remains of the Basque people, how they lived, how the different hypotheses are constructed, sometimes confirmed by another finding or that everything collapses.

That Basque people was destroyed. Shattered by the Romans, 102 arrowheads have been located on a single street. A massacre.

When we returned home, I couldn’t help but think about how this Basque people was destroyed and 2,500 years later Aranguren’s neighbours refaced the aggression. I remember a picture coming up in the newspapers where you could see the neighbors who were stopping machines with their bodies and a pastor who was bleeding from a head injury. I remember how they said on television that they were violent, that they were like terrorists, that they had been beaten and detained.

We have heard that the text that appears in the hand of Irulegi is the former Basque, the protobasque or another language before the Basque. These are very important things for the philologists, but to me, really, five.

We have just learned that, in order to deal with the destructive project that they want to carry out in Aroztegia, four citizens will be tried, who are asked for large jails and economic fines. And on television we keep hearing it. The same speech -- again.

We are a thin thread that from that hand of Irulegi, perhaps before, is opening its way between the chains. The thread that invented the ikastola, the weird thread running behind a witness, the one that cut the cables of the Itoiz swamp and paralyzed the nuclear power plants, is the same thread that was placed before the machines that were building the Aranguren landfill, which paralyzed the Aroztegi macroproject. A thin, old, broken thread, perhaps, that made its way...

I don't know if those Irulegi vascones were going out or not. I don't even know if you can tell. What I know is that I've felt the echo of his chick, of course, loud, strong.

Kontxita Beitia