Basques traditions : marriage and inheritance

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I visited several monuments and a traditional house in the French Basque country last weekend, where I learned from the owners what I am telling here. I hope it will interest you. Any Basque wears the name of the house/property from where are his/her origins : Etcheberry= «new house» in Basque, Salazar «old lounge», Mendoza «cold mountain»... The properties are transmitted unchanged to the eldest child, boy or girl. The French law says since 1793 that a property has to be shared equally between all children but the Basques found ways to avoid to divide their properties and they still follow their traditions in the countryside. The eldest child marries a cadet of another family. If the eldest was a girl, the tradition was that the husband and the children would wear the name of the wife. An eldest never marries another eldest, it is supposed to bring bad luck. If, by another bad luck, the cadet inherits of an elder brother/sister, the second child will inherit of this property and will take the name of this property or join the name of his/her parents. Basque properties are transmitted like that with the same limits since hundreds, if not thousands of years. As a Basque family may have more than two children, the other cadets could stay as servants on the property or were given the choice to migrate and establish their own property elsewhere. A Spanish king had decided that all Basques were nobles, those living in Spain like those living in France, and the cadets migrated massively to Spanish colonies (America, Philippines...) where their noble privileges were advantaging them. In France, only a few Basque families were considered noble, although all the criminal Basques had the noble privilege to be beheaded instead of hanged, and the commoners managed to never pay the state income tax applied to commoners in the rest of the kingdom. A Basque follows a French law only if he agrees to it... Photo : a street with typical Basque houses in Bayonne.