BEFORE MARIUPOL, BEFORE Gaza, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden and the Blitz, there was Guernica. The little Basque town in northern Spain was once the byword for state cruelty following the 1937 bombing of Guernica during Spain’s civil war—an unprecedented air attack on a populated city that shocked the global conscience and inspired Pablo Picasso’s most famous work, Guernica.
An atrocity is a weird thing for a place, the painting, is such an abstract depiction of civilian suffering that visitors have no problem posing in front of it. Guernica, the town, is a center of Basque culture. For Basques (who know it as Gernika), the violence that moved Picasso nearly a century ago is merely one chapter in a long history of resilience in their quest for freedom.
