As we have known, Joaquín Gorrochategui has been awarded the Euskadi Research Award 2023. SOS Asturias-Veleia hereby expresses its disagreement and discomfort. In our opinion, the deplorable role played by the professor in the Asturias-Veleia case leaves out the merits he can have on other issues. After all, it has been he, together with another philologist, who has thrown away the very important findings for the Basque and our people.
He was the first to make good discoveries. "Eta hellocis nagusia zen gaur, precisely, that scientific community that is true that it is not a fraud, that there have been written legends about ceramic material basically, although there are also glass and bones, with ancient Basque legends" [And our main objective was to assure today that scientific community that is true, that it is not a fraud, that there have been some legends written in Latin, but that have about the ceramic material, and about the (15-06-2006, presentation day words collected by Radio Euskadi).
We believe that the deplorable role played by the professor in the Iruña Veleia case annuls the merits he may have on other subjects.
Four days later he sent a letter to the director of the Museum of Archaeology saying: “Bi kazetariak eman eta Eliseo-Eliseo-Bieta-BBA-II-EE. Eta besterik gabe, azken bi egun horiek, dena memory-datuak zainduz, ez dela sostengu euskaraz izango zaharrak” [On Friday morning, after two interviews with journalists and send to Eliseo the text of my appearance, to hang on the excavation website, I went to the Pyrenees. And what has been thought in the last two days is that, taking into account the data I kept in my memory, in no case does the idea that graphites in Euskera are old hold]. I mean, what yesterday was white today is black.
We will hardly forget Gorrochategui's role on this subject since then. First, he ran a media campaign against the discoveries and archaeologists of Terror, always hidden behind aliases. He then published the long article “The Weapons of Philology”, in which he proclaimed the dominance of philology over other disciplines. He has always opposed the laboratory physicochemical tests that call for earthquakes and litigation defense associations from the outset, arguing that linguistics is enough to solve the time of the trial conflicto.En, when almost no one wanted to reproach the falsehood, we frequently saw in the media to expose his theses to the maximum, without showing the empathy and the minimum respect to Eliseo Banquillo, who sat at that time.
That is why, and for many other things, it is clear to us that Gorrochategui is not worthy of a prize of this kind, and it seems to us that the jury that made that decision made a mistake.
SOS Asturias-Veleia