It has to be curious to see in the window of an unknown store the old picture of the family, right? A 20th-century portrait of our ancestors, so dear at home… Lontxo Oiartzabal has not once or twice lived a similar situation. And he'll ask, reader, what does this family photo issue come to now? Because surely you also know the photo you see on these lines, the mythical photo of ARGIA.
It was built in 1925 by Juan Bautista Larreta, head of the house Azelain de Andoain, also called the cacique of Azelain, at the request of Zeruko Argia himself at the time. But who are the guy who has ARGIA in his hands and those around him? Who is reading the weekly by the fire? Also from Andoain is the family shown in the photo, the Oiartzabal family. Lontxo Oiartzabal told us the details of the photograph, as his father, aged 12-13, was still a child. “The one who appears behind the grandfather is our father,” he tells us; “and it is his little brother who reads the Light of Heaven.” It is a family in favor of his father, and in it are the grandparents of Lontxo, their uncles… there is only one missing, the youngest uncle of Lontxo, not yet born in 1925.La photo is very dear
at home. It was taken expressly for the weekly, it is a prepared image, but after all it is a family photo of the oiartzabaltarras; a small treasure of the family. Every descendant of a neighbor of Oiartzun who lives today has at home a portrait of his ancestors, but Lontxo has confessed that he is not the only one who left. In total there are three or four photos, some elements changed place, some placed and others removed… There is some image that above that wooden chair on the right is placed the novel Garoa by Txomin Agirre, for example.
Besides being a memory for the relatives, it is also a remembrance of the dwelling, since in Sorabilla there are no traces of it since 1988. They had to be shot down by some problems in the structure of the building.