About the Eguzkilore

The Human Flower Project is featuring a post on a Basque tradition known as the Eguzkilore.

It is quite interesting, read on:

Eguzkilore

In Basque country, look for a dried thistle tacked by the door.

In our part of the world, one may approach a house and spot a little shoo-away sign: “No soliciting.” In Basque country, the message is more profound, beautiful too. A dried thistle or eguzkilore (also called flor del sol) may be discreetly hung near the front door. It’s a pre-Christian custom meant to ward off all manner of evil spirits (including, we suppose, some solicitors).

In Basque folklore it was believed that before people got wise to agriculture “uncommonly strong shaggy beings...worked the land.” San Martin “seized the seeds from the lords of the wood,” giving them to the first human farmers, and understandably the spirits of the wild have held a grudge ever since.

Houses, being human refuge, are ever under threat from “sorcerers, lamia (mermaid-resembling creatures with bird’s legs), the spirits of illness, storms and lightening.” The eguzkilore, a bright bristly eye, stares back at all such encroaching spirits and keeps them from daring to pry open a window or even ringing the bell. (The Romantic poets and Pre-Raphaelite painters of England developed a hate-love thing for the Lamia, though it seems the Basques never fell under her spell.)

Photos of eguzkilore are scarce. If any readers are in the Basque region, please keep your eyes open and send us a stronger photograph. And if anyone knows which variety of thistle qualifies as eguzkilore, send word. The bloom looks more like a spiny sunflower than the purple tufted thistles we know (beloved in Scotland, not so well admired by farmers in the Kentucky Bluegrass).

To my Basque readers, if you or any of your friends have a good pictute of an Eguzkilore please send it to the author of the afore mentioned page, it is good to know that there is people out there willing to present Euskal Herria on all of its aspects and complexity, unlike the main stream media that finds space to talk about the land of the Basque speakers only when describing violent acts.

Eskerrik asko!

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