In late April, one of the world's strangest laws was quietly revoked. Authorities in Iceland's Westfjords district, the scenic northwestern corner of the island nation, repealed a 400-year-old decree ordering the death on sight of any Basque person found in the region.
"The decision to do away with the decree was more symbolic than anything else," Westfjords district commissioner Jonas Gudmundsson told reporters last month. "We have laws, of course, and killing anyone — including Basques — is forbidden these days."
In a country of Iceland's small size — it has a population of just over 300,000 people — such seemingly obscure episodes still have a profound resonance. The prominent Icelandic author Sjon wrote of the "slaying of the Spaniards" in his acclaimed 2011 novel "From the Mouth of the Whale," depicting the incident as a hideous act of treachery and opportunism carried out against the shipwrecked sailors.
Though remote and sparsely populated, Iceland still found itself at the crossroads of all sorts of global history. The Viking explorers who first reached the New World set sail from its shores. A decade after the killings of the Basque whalers, raiders from as far away as North Africa ravaged the Icelandic coast, kidnapping hundreds of locals as slaves. The "Turkish abductions" of the 17th century are a defining event in Icelandic national memory and enshrined in the country's most famous church in the capital, Reykjavik.
See also