Bego Antón and the Basque witch-hunt myth

Bego Antón portrays the witch hunts: historical reality or fiction?

Bilbao-born photographer Bego Antón, winner of the 2017 PHotoEspaña Breakthrough Award, has turned her lens on one of the darkest episodes in European history: the persecution of witchcraft. Her documentary project, started a decade ago, explores the memory of the alleged witches in Euskal Herria. But the reaction from amateur historians has been swift: unlike its counterparts in other countries, the Spanish Inquisition never executed a single witch in the Basque Country.

The Spanish Inquisition versus the witch myth

The argument is not new, but it gains strength with every new work that questions it. The Spanish Inquisition regarded witchcraft as a pagan superstition and did not hunt witches, but rather those who believed in them. According to figures cited in the discussion, the number of executions for witchcraft in the so-called Basque Country is zero. This contrasts sharply with the witch hunts in Protestant countries, where tens of thousands burned.

Bego Antón's project: memory and bias

Antón, trained as a journalist, has focused her work on communities and beliefs outside the mainstream. Her photographic series on witchcraft belongs to a revisionist current seeking to dismantle the cliché of the old, evil witch. However, some critics point out that this approach may feed an anti-Spanish narrative that attributes to the Inquisition a cruelty which, in this specific respect, it never had.

It is hard to separate art from ideology. While the artist recovers local memories of repression, the historical data indicate that institutional persecution of witchcraft in Spain was almost non-existent. The debate remains open: is it legitimate to use a real oppression — that of women accused of witchcraft — to build a narrative that historiography does not support?