I Shall Defend the House of My Father

What a Baserri Is

A baserri is not simply a farmhouse. In Basque culture it is the primary unit of identity — the vessel in which a family, a language, and a way of life are carried from generation to generation. Families introduced themselves not by surname but by the name of their house. The house outlasted its occupants. Its name was the name that endured.

Olabe had stood for four centuries on its hillside above Bedarona. It had survived wars, famines, and the great transformation of Basque society brought by industrialisation. It had sheltered generations of anonymous families whose names are not recorded in any chronicle — the very people that the Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called the bearers of intrahistoria: the hidden, unrecorded current of history that flows beneath the turbulent surface of events, and which is the truest substance of a people’s story.

Aresti’s first line — I shall defend the house of my father — is both a declaration and a covenant. It names the act of defending as the primary moral obligation. Not merely preserving or maintaining, but actively, bodily defending. When Joseba Attard left behind his career as a graphic designer in Elorrio and moved his young family into a yurt on a ruined hillside farm, he made exactly this declaration — not in words, but in the most concrete terms possible.

Gabriel Aresti and the Language of Defiance

Gabriel Aresti (1933–1975) was a poet of Bilbao, writing at the height of the Francoist suppression of Basque language and culture. To write in Euskara in 1964 was itself an act of resistance. His collection Harri eta Herri — Stone and People, or Stone and Country, the Basque word herri carrying both meanings simultaneously — announced a politics and a poetics that placed the ordinary home, the baserri, the father’s house, at the centre of everything worth defending.

It is significant that Joseba Attard, a graphic designer whose work had served Korrika — the great annual Basque language relay race — and the Durangoko Azoka cultural fair, recognised himself in this poem. He has spoken of adapting Aresti’s lines for contemporary contexts, of finding the parallels shockingly stark. He did not encounter the poem as an outside observer. He encountered it as its subject.

Against the Wolves, Against Drought, Against Usury, Against the Law

The Forces That Emptied Olabe

A baserri is not abandoned in a day. It is emptied by the accumulated pressure of forces larger than any single family can withstand. Aresti names them with precision: wolves, drought, usury, the law. These are not metaphors drawn from fantasy. They are the actual wolves of history — economic, political, and structural — that broke the baserri system across the Basque Country through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The first wolf was industrialisation. When the factories of Bilbao began their great expansion in the late nineteenth century, the children of baserri families faced a choice that was hardly a choice at all: the grinding poverty of subsistence farming, or the wage of a factory worker. They went to the cities. The baserris began to empty.

The second wolf was the rural exodus of the 1950s and 1970s — Spain’s most intense period of agricultural mechanisation and urban migration — when hundreds of thousands of rural families relocated permanently to industrial centres. In the Basque hills, farmhouse after farmhouse fell silent.

For Bedarona specifically, a third wolf had been present far longer. The area around Ispaster, Ea, Natxitua, and Bedarona had for generations been a point of departure for Basque emigrants to the United States — young men who went to Nevada and Idaho and Wyoming to herd sheep, and who did not return. The etxea waited. The inheritance had no one to receive it.

The Philosopher’s Response: Ortiz-Osés and the Wound

The Basque philosopher Andrés Ortiz-Osés, founder of symbolic hermeneutics at the University of Deusto, argued that meaning is not explanation but healing — specifically, the symbolic healing of injury. He spent his life examining the wounds that run through Basque culture: the wound of suppression, the wound of diaspora, the wound of a people separated from the land and language that gave them their deepest sense of self.

In his framework, the emptied baserri is not merely a building in disrepair. It is a wound — a visible severance between a people and their inheritance. The wolves did not only take the cattle and the income. They took something that cannot be itemised: the continuity of a way of life, the living transmission of Euskara in the kitchen, the knowledge of how to make bread by hand, the memory of what it means to be at home in a particular piece of the earth.

I Shall Lose My Cattle, My Orchards, My Pinewoods

The Sacred Emptiness: Oteiza and the Void

When the Attards arrived at Olabe in 2016, this was precisely what they found: lost cattle, lost orchards, twenty acres of pasture and ancient forest grown wild through decades of abandonment, the farmhouse itself crumbling, its interior hollowed out. Aresti’s stanza was not poetry. It was a survey report.

But the Basque sculptor and philosopher Jorge Oteiza, who was a close friend and collaborator of Aresti’s in the 1960s, had a different way of reading emptiness. Oteiza spent his artistic life making sculptures whose entire purpose was to frame empty spaces — not to fill the void, but to honour it, to make it visible, to reveal the spiritual energy that vacancy contains. His concept was the huts: the Basque word for vacuum, for the absence of something yearned for.

Oteiza argued that a form deprived of its mass does not become nothing. It becomes a register of the mass that was there — charged with the energy of what it once held. He compared it to an apple with a bite taken out of it: the hollow is not absence but presence of a different kind. His stone sculptures — metaphysical boxes, he called them — generate dark and mysterious interior spaces that, when encountered, produce the sensation of a sacred place.

Read through Oteiza’s eyes, the ruined Olabe is not merely derelict. It is a metaphysical box. The emptiness of its rooms is not the absence of the families who once lived there but the register of their presence, still charged, still holding the shape of four centuries of human life. The wild orchards, the encroaching forest, the crumbling stable — these are not failures. They are the sacred emptiness waiting to be entered by people willing to receive what it holds.

This is what the Attards did. They did not arrive to erase the void. They arrived to inhabit it — to bring life back into a space that had been, in Oteiza’s terms, waiting for exactly the kind of spiritual filling that their project represents.

I Shall Lose My Hands

Faith, Labour, and the Body of the Restoration

The fourth stanza is the most bodily. The speaker does not lose abstract things — values, memories, culture — but hands. The instruments of labour. The means of building, repairing, planting, shearing, baking.

Joseba and Joanna Attard are driven by a Christian faith. Their project is explicitly a Kingdom Outpost — a place where the values and practices of God’s Kingdom are made visible in a particular community and location. The farmhouse is not a church building, and this is deliberate: there is no Basque-speaking church in the Basque Country in any conventional sense, and most Basque people will not enter a church building. But they will come to a Basque home.

The theology here is incarnational in the most literal sense. God does not communicate primarily through propositions but through flesh, through the physical world, through hospitality and bread and the smell of woodsmoke and the warmth of a working kitchen. The Attards did not come to Olabe to build a programme. They came to build a home.

The hands that were lost in Aresti’s stanza are the hands that the Attards brought back: Joseba’s hands shearing sheep, Joanna’s hands teaching, their daughter Nahia’s small hands feeding the goats. The volunteers who came — friends from England and Belgium and across the Basque Country — gave their own hands to the restoration: clearing scrubland, repointing walls, laying floors. This is the ancient Basque practice of auzolan, communal labour for the common good.

This is the New Testament vision of the Body of Christ: diverse people, each contributing their particular gift, building something that none could construct alone. Inasmuch as it is also the Basque practice of auzolan, it reminds us that the deepest Biblical values have their echo in the oldest human communities — not as imported doctrine but as native wisdom, rediscovered.

I Shall Lose My Soul, My Lineage

The Agony and the Hope: Unamuno, Aresti, and the Cost

The fifth stanza is Aresti’s most radical claim. The speaker will lose not only material things — but soul, descendants, the continuation of the self. And still the house will endure. The house outlasts its people. The name of the etxea survives when the family name is gone.

Miguel de Unamuno called this la agonía: not agony in the popular sense of suffering, but the Greek agon, the struggle, the wrestling. His life was defined by the agony between faith and doubt, between belonging and exile, between love of the Basque people and horror at nationalism’s darker turns. He was a man who lost many things and yet refused to let the house fall.

His concept of intrahistoria — the hidden, unrecorded history of ordinary people — connects most deeply to this stanza. The families who lived at Olabe left no soul in the historical record, no descendants remembered by name. They are among the innumerable anonymous who rise and work and love and die leaving scarcely a trace. Yet Unamuno insists that it is precisely these lives — invisible to conventional history, recorded only in the memory of God — that constitute the real substance of a people’s being.

Joseba Attard left Elorrio and a successful career not to make himself famous or wealthy but to give himself to something that would outlast him: a baserri that had already outlasted its builders by four centuries, and that he hoped would outlast him by four more. The soul willingly surrendered to something that endures is not lost. It is poured into the stones and the soil and the bread and the language of a place that will hold it long after the individual is gone.

The House of My Father Shall Remain Standing

Olabe Today: The Restoration as Resurrection

Since 2016 the Attard family has lovingly restored Olabe, transforming it from a ruin into a family-run hostel, smallholding, and event space on the rural Basque coast — a place where the forest meets the sea, where the rhythms of the traditional baserri are lived alongside the hospitality of the open door.

The Biblical resonances are not incidental but constitutive. The Isaiah 58 promise — that those who give themselves freely will rebuild ancient ruins and be called repairers of the breach — is enacted at Olabe in the most literal possible terms. Nehemiah’s wall-building project — communal, stone by stone, animated by grief over what had been lost and determination that it should not stay lost — is the pattern of every volunteer weekend at Olabe.

And Aresti’s final line — Nire aitaren etxea zutik geldituko da — is no longer a defiant hope but a statement of fact. The house stands. After four centuries, after the wolves of industrialisation and emigration and rural exodus, after the decades of silence and decay, the house of the father stands.

Language as the Final Wall

Joseba Attard moved to the Basque Country at the age of twenty-seven specifically so that his family would not lose Euskara. This single act — leaving the comfort of England to immerse a family in an endangered language — is the clearest possible expression of Aresti’s covenant. The house of the father is not only stone and timber. It is language. And if the language falls, the house falls more completely than any physical ruin could bring it down.

Olabe is bilingual: Basque and English, ancient and global, rooted and open. Workshops are offered in both languages. Children from ikastolas come to learn bread-making and animal care and the rhythms of the natural world — and they learn these things in Euskara. Guests from twenty-five countries sit at the table and encounter, perhaps for the first time, a language that sounds like no other on earth, spoken by a family who chose it over convenience.

In Gabriel Aresti’s vision, the poem itself was a wall in the house of the father — a wall built of words in the language that was being suppressed, words that declared that suppression would not succeed. Olabe’s bilingual hospitality continues building that wall, word by word, guest by guest, loaf of bread by loaf of bread.