Word: vitoria
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...busy provincial town of Vitoria in the heart of the Basque country, a horse-drawn police van clattered down the cobblestoned Street of the Founder of the Handmaidens of Jesus and stopped at the decaying old courthouse. Two prisoners stepped out. From the watching crowd a woman and a small girl darted forward, crying, "Felix! . . . Papa!" The woman tried to kiss the husband she had not seen for almost three years; the child threw herself into his arms. Grey-clad police intervened. "In with you!" they said gruffly, and the two prisoners disappeared into the courthouse, to join 15 others...
...stoutly Roman Catholic Basques have rallied around their church as the last champion of their national rights. Their clergy, unlike the Spanish church, was overwhelmingly anti-Franco in the Civil War; the Franco government, in reprisal, executed 1.7 priests, imprisoned many others, and exiled the Basque Bishop of Vitoria. Although new Spanish bishops were sent to three Basque dioceses, the local clergy remained rebellious, went on teaching the catechism in the Basque language and talking about Basque national traditions from their pulpits-both serious crimes in the eyes of Franco's government...
...Vitoria kept its word. For 4½ centuries, the earth of the Judiz Mendi lay inviolate in the center of the growing city (pop. 50,000). In modern times, all marks of individual graves long lost, it has become a quiet, run-down park...
Last spring Mayor Gonzalo de la Calle found that the vacant plaza interfered with some city rebuilding projects. Armed with the ancient contract, he crossed the French border to Bayonne, where many of Vitoria's exiled Jews had once settled. Seeking out the surprised leaders of Bayonne's Sephardic Jewish community, he asked them to release Vitoria from the terms of its ancient pledge. They readily agreed...
Last week four black-clad Jews arrived at Vitoria's town hall to complete the formalities. In return for their release, the city promised to put any bones found on Judiz Mendi into a memorial, to be built on the spot. Then the Jewish delegates, followed by members of the town council, walked to the old cemetery. Quietly they chanted the archaic Castilian of the Sephardic prayers for the dead. As they prayed, workmen in a corner of the plot began to dig the foundations of a new building, wounding the soil of Judiz Mendi for the first time...