Ezquioga
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Ezquioga, also called Ezkioga, now Ezkio, is a small town, part of the municipality of Ezquioga-Ichaso since 1965, now Ezkio-Itsaso , in the Spanish province of Guipúzcoa or Gipuzkoa, in the autonomous community of the Basque Country. It is most famous for alleged Marian apparitions, controversial public visions of the Virgin Mary starting in 1931.
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[edit] Location
Ezquioga is a dispersed farming township located at Latitude 43° 4' 60N, Longitude 2° 16' 0W, at an altitude of 555 meters above sea level, in the Goiherri region. There are no large cities nearby; Zumarraga, Spain, a nearby town, had a population of 10,265 in 2000.
[edit] The Visions
[edit] Background
In April 14, 1931, the Second Spanish Republic was declared after anti-monarchist candidates won elections in urban areas throughout Spain, King Alfonso XIII of Spain abdicated. Many of the new government were Socialist or otherwise anti-clerical. However this did not spread to the religious Basque Country. In the elections on June 28, rightist coalitions won handily in Gipuzkoa and Navarra.
On April 23, 1931, children playing in Torralba de Aragón, in Huesca, saw and heard what they thought was the figure of the Virgin Mary inside the church, saying "Do not mistreat my son.". Catholic newspapers reported this vision throughout Spain. The child seers of Ezkioga allegedly read the Basque version in Argia, on May 5, 1931. On June 4, 12 girls and a boy, between 9 and 14 years old, saw an "unearthly" woman in mourning accompanied by a bright light in a church in the Basque town of Mendigorría.
[edit] Ezquioga Visions
On 29 June, 1931, a brother and sister, ages 7 and 11, claimed to have seen the Virgin on a hillside known as Anduaga above a church and school in Ezquioga. Their own father didn't believe them, but hundreds of others came to the hillside to see for themselves. Eventually hundreds of thousands of devout worshippers, mostly Basques, came to Ezquioga expecting visions, and hundreds did. On the nights of July 12, 16, and 18, and October 16, up to eighty thousand persons turned out. In the first month there were over a hundred alleged seers, and occasional visions continued until the fall of 1933. Seers described blinding light, convulsed, many fell unconscious, and some bled. In 1933, as a kind of escalation against negative reaction against the visionaries, bleeding crufixes were reported around Ezquioga.
[edit] Reactions
Many rightist Basque nationalists, preparing for a civil war against the Republic, supported the visionaries, believing the visions were a sign that the Virgin Mary supported them. The official church, on the other hand, soon turned against the seers. At the invitation of the diocese, Jose Antonio Laburu, a Jesuit, preached against the "mental contagion" of the Ezquioga visions at San Sebastian in April and June of 1932, contrasting them against the "true" visions of Teresa of Avila and Thomas Aquinas. Similarly the Republican government tried to suppress the visions. In the fall of 1932, Pedro del Pozo Rodríguez, the governor of Gipuzkoa, briefly interned those who claimed to see visions. The visions became a taboo subject in the region, and the visionaries went underground, meeting in small groups with loyal followers. They were still doing so seventy years later.
[edit] Works
William A. Christian, Jr., wrote a detailed and influential study of the event, Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ, ISBN 0-520-21948-1, published in 1996.
A Spanish language film titled Visionarios, in 2001, directed and written by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, and starring Eduardo Noriega, Leire Ucha, and Ingrid Rubio dramatized the event. The plot is that Joshe, a young man from Ezkioga is torn between two women who each claim to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary on a nearby hillside. Meanwhile the town is overwhelmed by outsiders seeking to share or exploit the girls’ miraculous vision.
[edit] References
- ^ Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ Christian, William A., Jr. Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1996. (complete book online, from the eScholarship program of the University of California California Digital Library) ISBN 0-520-21948-1
- Visionarios at the Internet Movie Database
- Visionaries Movie review at RottenTomatoes.com
[edit] See also
- Unbe, a mount location in Biscay with a similar unofficial cult of Marian apparitions.
[edit] External links
- Ezkio and Ezquioga (Ezkioga: Las apariciones) at the Spanish-language Auñamendi Encyclopedia.
