Basque Culture

Lauburu

Coral Ikurrina Earrings

This semester I'm talking Basque and recently I had to look deeper into their culture and from that I came across a design company, Ahizpak Designs. It was started by two sisters who come from a Basque background and their work features décor, jewelry, paintings and other arts featured around Basque symbolism and culture. I thought I would share it because their work is really beautiful and the Basque culture really shines through. Maite and Izar, (the two sisters who created Ahizpak Designs) would have never created their business Ahizpak Designs it weren’t for Boise. Boise is the largest Basque community outside of the Basque Country and the two sisters come from a Basque background.

Carved Lauburu

Maite, the older sister works with pottery, jewelry and interior design where as Izar, paints and does graphic design. Izar actually designed the logos for the Oinkari Basque Dancers and the Cenarrusa Center for Basque Studies here in Boise. Although, there aren’t a great deal of Basque symbols that doesn’t stop the sisters from using their creativity in designing modern ways to approach the Basque culture. The symbol that is repeated quite a bit in Ahizpak’s work is a spirally looking design that has four petals (as seen in the picture). After doing some research I found that this lauburu or a Basque cross.  Lau buru means, “four heads”, “four ends” or “four summits” in Basque. The lauburu is seen as a symbol of prosperity but Imaol Mujica, a Basque intellectual liked to say that the four heads meant spirit, life, consciousness and form. Their work doesn’t only feature this symbol but also photographs from the Basque Country along with paintings of Basque dancers. Until this class I never really realized how big the Basque culture was here and its something that I’m glad we can embrace as a community. It’s not every day that art I look has such great historical meaning behind it and for that reason I’m glad it influenced these sisters to start this business.

"Uztai"