The dark wood of the melamine tables is powdered in the old writing of the magazine Kili-kili in Goienkale in Bilbao. Inside a closet we found the treasure wrapped in boxes of about 40x40 cm, closed with oxidized wires: Hard drives.

The album was recorded 50 years ago by the priests who were locked in the seminary of Derio and who sang during the long battle. Edited by Agorila de Baiona, who republished on the 2012 CD, soon became a symbol of anti-francoist resistance.

But what did more than 700 pieces of vinyl disk in the cabinet at Kili-kili's headquarters? You have to talk a couple of times about the creator of the magazine to understand this story.

Magnetophon by José Antonio Retolaza

José Antonio Retolaza (Bilbao, 1929-2014) lost Euskera in his childhood, but he recovered it on his own, at the seminary of Vitoria. “The Church and the Basque Country were always their way,” says Etxahun Galparsoro, the son-in-law of the Benedictine archive of Lazkao. In the 1960s he created the character Kili-kili under the tutelage of the catechesis of the church of San Antón de Bilbao, with the aim of alphabetizing the children in Basque, which would later become a famous comic book.

Retolaza chose to go against the ecclesiastical hierarchy and in 1960 he signed the letter of the 339 Abades against Franco. Thus “ruined” his ecclesiastical career, unlike his beloved friend Juan Uriarte: “If it had been confirmed today it would not have been a bishop,” he says in the autobiography book about the emeritus bishop of San Sebastian.

When the occupation of Derio took place in 1968, Retolaza drove the priest of St. Antón, Don Klaudio Gallastegi, to the seminary, to celebrate a Mass to the inmates. And with him is a great magnetophone called Grundig. Apparently, it was on this machine that he received the first songs from the rebel priests who were in Syria.

“But the album was not recorded in the seminary,” explains Xabier Amuriza (Etxano, 1941). The idea of the album arose with the aim of leaving a testimony on Derio's struggle, once the lockdown was over: “We thought we had to meet among those who had the experience of singing a group, we would be 20 or 25, and the recording was made in the convent of the Carmelites of Amorebieta.”

Camarade-curé

Liturgical songs were collected in Basque with a political message behind, as well as familiar berets – or from Amuriza with a lockdown – and songs that were in the mouthpiece, such as the famous Ez, ez dut nahi dut of Julen Lekuona.

[The full collection can be heard here]

It was precisely on this last tone that the French left-wing singer Colette Magny put her voice on when, two years later, the album came into her hands. “Friend priest, you’ve been punished / But your punishment has been taken over by the people and the new Jewish priest / designated will have no one at the Mass,” says the song Camarade-curé in French. The filmmaker Pierre Prouveze will now release a documentary on the genealogy of this song and the history of the Basque Abades.

Let's go back to 1968. After recording, Amuriza and Retolaza took their master to Ipar Euskal Herria, under the latter’s mini-morris, and with them on Klaudio: “We needed someone to create respect to cross the border and that cure, with its 150 kilos and fountain, was the most appropriate person,” says Amuriza. The gendarmes managed, by the way, to deliver the copy to the hands of Telesforo Monzón.

In May 1969, the album Indarra discovered that many of the priests of Derio and Amuriza were already in prison in Zamora. Despite being an open and completely persecuted clandestine – the private houses that the police were chasing him and also the registration of the headquarters of Euskaltzaindia – there was a great echo. It was not a simple Mass, it was the cry of a crushed people.

ARGIA will open its doors

After many years, a friend named Julian Goikoetxea approached Iñaki Egurrola on the street and said: As Egurrola is from the Euskerazaleak association, which supported Kili-kili from the beginning, he told him that he had one thing that belonged to them. In an iron-making workshop in Basauri, they found that the high weight table could move with a hidden lever and behind it a hole: in it were the 12-inch LP vinyls. So they were taken to the Kili-kili residence.

Fifty years later, ARGIA will complete the work that remained pending by Franco’s repression and we will disseminate these records among the members of our community. They will be available at the stand of the Durango Fair, as well as on our website azoka.argia.eus.