Poet Lorca's bones to be exhumed after 72 years (News Feature)

By Sinikka Tarvainen Sep 18, 2008, 12:01 GMT

Madrid - The verses of Spain's most beloved poet Federico Garcia Lorca are read all over the world, but his admirers cannot lay flowers or observe a moment of silence at his grave.

Seven decades after Lorca was shot dead by General Francisco Franco's nationalists at the start of the Spanish civil war, his remains are believed to lie in an anonymous mass grave near the southern city of Granada.

For many Spaniards, the fate of Lorca's bones is a scandal, but opposition from his family had blocked the opening of the mass grave.

Now, however, the family has changed its mind, opening up the possibility of Lorca being given a dignified burial, though the relatives stress that the exhumation must not be turned into a media 'spectacle.'

In August 1936, one month after Franco's uprising against the leftist republican government had sparked the civil war, the 38-year poet was arrested, questioned, imprisoned, and taken to the execution site near the village of Viznar.

The Francoists also shot dead a teacher and two bullfighting assistants, but reportedly vented their fury especially on the poet, spitting on his body and calling him a 'red queer' as he lay in the mass grave.

As a leftist and homosexual who wrote about the oppressed - such as gypsies - Lorca represented values opposed to those of the nationalists, and was a natural target for their wrath.

Lorca's work is haunted by the premonition of violent death which, when it came true, helped to turn him into an international cult figure.

After Franco won the war in 1939, Lorca continued to haunt his dictatorship, which banned his works in Spain for over a decade.

Franco's 1939-75 regime paid tribute to nationalists killed in the war, but tens of thousands of republicans remain buried in mass graves like the one in Viznar.

A 2007 law aimed at rehabilitating Franco's victims offers the possibility of financial support to dozens of citizens' associations which have dug up the remains of thousands of people from mass graves.

Lorca was shot together with Dioscoro Galindo, a republican teacher executed on charges of not believing in God, and bullfighting assistants Francisco Galadi and Joaquin Arcollas, who were anarchists and trade unionists.

The exact location of the mass grave is unclear, with some investigators now placing it at 400 metres from where it was believed to be.

The families of Galindo and Galadi have asked the National Court to order the reopening of the mass grave.

The request followed a recent initiative by National Court judge Baltasar Garzon to establish a census of Franco's victims, whose fate had never been investigated by a democratic Spain trying to heal old divisions.

The Lorca family had been known to oppose the reopening of the grave, but said on Thursday that it would not prevent it.

'Although we would like it not to be done, we will respect the wishes of the other implicated parties,' Lorca's niece Laura Garcia Lorca said in an interview published by the daily El Pais.

Many Spaniards feel upset that the country's best-known modern poet lies 'buried like a dog,' as author Manuel Vicent once put it, in a forested area littered by bottles, but the Lorca family sees it differently.

Exhuming Lorca and giving him a separate burial would set him apart from at least 1,000 other victims of Franco who were buried in Viznar during the war and the dictatorship, Laura Garcia Lorca explained.

'This is (Lorca's) definitive tomb,' where 'he needs to rest like one more' victim, she said.

The family also does not believe that an exhumation would yield significant new information to Lorca's biographers.

'Not wanting to open the grave does not mean we do not want to know history and to denounce it,' Laura Garcia Lorca stressed in another interview on Thursday.

If, however, the poet's bones are retrieved, there are several options for his grave site, Laura Garcia Lorca said.

'He could be taken to New York (to be buried) with his father, to Madrid, with his mother, or with his sisters, at Huerta de San Vicente,' the summer residence of the Lorca family near Granada, she explained.

Lorca's ashes could also be scattered in the different places where he lived, the poet's niece added.