Mairu

Also Known As: plural mairuak; Mairi in Lower Navarre, Mairiac in the older Souletin records; from Latin Maurus, “Moor”
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Basque Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: Colossal strength, sufficient to carry megalithic capstones by hand from one mountain to another and to raise dolmens, stone circles and fortified houses.
Role in Mythos: The mairuak are the non-Christian people of the age before, to whom the Basque uplands credit their megalithic monuments, and their name is also the ordinary Basque word for anyone unbaptised.
Relation to Humans: They belong on the far side of the line Christianity drew, and Roland is said to have driven them out of the country, after which they kept to their caves. The same word attached itself to living neighbours who were never baptised and to children who died before the font, whose bones acquired a reputation of their own.

Above the Gaxteenia farmstead at Mendibe, two upright slabs hold a third one flat across them, and the top stone is red. That colour is the problem. The nearest rock of that kind lies over on Armiaga or across toward Urtxuri, a long walk away and uphill in both directions, and the slab weighs what a slab that size weighs. On 4 June 1952 a farmer named J. Etxemendi stood beside the dolmen with the ethnographer José Miguel de Barandiarán and gave him the local account, which had been the local account for as long as anyone could remember. The old people called the place the church of the Mairi. A woman had carried the capstone up here on her head. Her hands were busy at the time, because she was spinning.

Mairu means Moor. From there the word slid outward in Basque until it meant anyone who was not Christian: a person of some earlier age and some other faith, and equally the neighbour down the lane who never got to the font. That same word carries the builders of the megaliths. The mairuak are not a pantheon and were never worshipped. They are the people of before, remembered as enormously strong, and stationed permanently in the high country where the evidence of their work still stands in the rain.

The evidence is written into the map. Mairubide, the road of the mairu, at the cromlechs of Oiartzun. Mairuilarri, the mairu’s grave, at Zugarramurdi and at Sara. Mairuetxe, the house of the mairu, for the standing stones on Buluntsa, for the Mendibe dolmen, for the megaliths out in the Okabe range. The word runs off the monuments and into the hedgerows: mairu-arhan for the sloe, mairu-ilhar for a wild pea, as though anything that came up without a farmer behind it had also been left there by them. Mairukeri, from the same root, simply means wild conduct. And a stone circle is a mairubaratza, the garden of the mairu. Baratza means a kitchen garden today. It used to mean a cemetery.

What they built, according to the tellings gathered in Lower Navarre, Labourd and the eastern edge of Gipuzkoa, was the heavy and impossible end of the local architecture. The dolmens and cromlechs of Ibañeta at Zugarramurdi, of Oiartzun, of Buluntsa. The old fortified houses at Irissarry, Donamartea in Lecumberry, Aphatea in Bussunarits, Logras in Zaro, Larrea and Lahostanea in Ispuru. They carried the boulders in their hands off the mountain of Arradoy to wherever the work was. Elsewhere in the country the same feats are pinned on other names, on the jentilak, the maide, the laminak, the sorginak, and the stories are not tidy about who did what and do not appear to care.

Beyond scale and strength the record is nearly empty. Jean-François Cerquand, collecting in Soule and Lower Navarre in the 1870s, was told they were wild men, handsome, tall and rich, and that Roland later drove them out. Barandiarán, half a century on, found them described in Lower Navarre as spirits of colossal force, or, some said, as a very old kind of human being who had lived here before anyone else. No face. No voice. No garment beyond the single word rich. Cerquand added that ordinary Basques, including reasonably educated ones, barely distinguished the mairiac from the laminak at all and gave them only a double dose of wickedness. The sources will not even settle their sex. Cerquand’s material puts them among the male beings, alongside the maide of Zuberoa and the intxixu of the Bidasoa, while the capstone at Mendibe arrived on a woman’s head with a distaff in her fist.

Once a week the mairiac came down onto the moor of Mendi and met the laminak there, and the two of them sat and watched some entertainment together. Nobody thought to record what the entertainment was. It is one of the very few things they are described as doing that does not involve lifting something.

Then Roland came through the mountains and the arrangement ended. He drove them out of the region, and the tellings keep him near them ever afterwards. Once a year, one account runs, Roland’s horse appears on the pont d’Espagne and lets out a single enormous whinny, and at the sound of it the mairiac go down into the backs of their caves and stay there.

They left their gold behind. Etxemendi finished his account at the Mendibe dolmen by saying that the old people reckoned a calf-hide full of it lay buried inside the house of the Mairi. And a man from Sara told Barandiarán something quieter and stranger: that when you passed the mairubaratzak of Ibañeta, you said a prayer for the people buried there. The country had worked out what the circles were long before anybody dug one.

Digging one took a while. Telesforo de Aranzadi and Pedro Manuel de Soraluze opened the Oiartzun cromlechs in 1914 and found nothing that would date them or explain them. Barandiarán opened one at Olegi, in Ezkurra, in 1936, and found nothing either. In 1957 and 1959, working on a commission from the French Ministry of National Education, he went at the circles of Mendittipi and Meatse above Bidarrai and Itsasu, and this time the ground answered. In the middle of one, a little box of flat stones holding earth and lumps of charcoal. In another, six metres across and ringed by twenty upright slabs, two flint scrapers, a borer, a tanged and winged arrowhead, and a hammerstone worn smooth where a hand had gripped it. In the centres of several, cists half a metre long and a quarter wide, the right size and shape for ashes. He published the conclusion in 1962: Iron Age cremation burials in the Hallstatt manner, strung along the old droving routes around the old summer pastures. The garden of the mairu turned out to be a graveyard.

The bleakest strand of the tradition has nothing to do with strength. Because a mairu is anyone unbaptised, a child who died before baptism is a mairu, and such children were not laid in consecrated ground; they went in beside the wall of their own house or in the garden next to it. The arm bone of one is a mairubeso, and in the legends collected at Garazi, at Ataun and at Meñaka it burns. A thief lights it and carries it through a farmhouse and the household sleeps on under that small steady flame, and every door in the place opens to him.

Their limits follow from what they are. Their work belongs to the dark and to the mountains, and a mairu with no megalith to account for has nothing to do. They cannot cross the line the church drew across the country; everything they made stands on this side of it, being measured and mapped and photographed, while they wait out the centuries in the rock behind. The word itself did not fare much better. It came into Basque meaning a Moor, went on to mean a heathen, then a stranger, then an unbaptised infant, and finished as a term for behaving like an animal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Mairu in Basque mythology?

The Mairu, plural mairuak, are beings of the pre-Christian past in Basque tradition, credited with building the dolmens, stone circles and old fortified houses of the Basque mountains. The name is the ordinary Basque word for a Moor, extended to mean any non-Christian, which places them squarely in the age before the church arrived. In much of the Basque Country the same building feats are attributed instead to the jentilak, the maide or the laminak.

What does the word “mairu” actually mean?

Mairu comes from Latin Maurus and means Moor in Basque, but it broadened to cover anyone who is not Christian or has not been baptised. It is applied both to the legendary builders of the megaliths and to real unbaptised people, including children who died before baptism. The related word mairukeri means wild or heathen conduct.

What is a mairubaratza?

A mairubaratza is a Basque stone circle, literally the garden of the mairu, though baratza once meant a cemetery rather than a garden. Similar names cover megalithic sites across the region: Mairubide, the road of the mairu, at Oiartzun; Mairuilarri, the mairu’s grave, at Zugarramurdi and Sara; Mairuetxe, the house of the mairu, at Mendibe and Buluntsa. Excavations by José Miguel de Barandiarán in 1957 and 1959 found cremated remains in cists inside several such circles and dated them to the Iron Age.

What is a mairubeso?

A mairubeso is the arm bone of a child who died unbaptised, and in Basque legend it burns like a torch. Tales collected at Garazi, Ataun and Meñaka describe a thief carrying a lit mairubeso through a farmhouse, whose occupants sleep through the light while every door opens to him. Unbaptised children were buried beside their own house or in the adjoining garden rather than in the churchyard, which is where the belief has its root.

What happened to the Mairu?

Roland is said to have driven the Mairu out of the Basque country, and the stories keep the two of them linked afterwards. In one account Roland’s horse appears once a year on the pont d’Espagne and gives a tremendous whinny, at which the mairuak retreat into the depths of their caves. Their disappearance marks the same boundary their name does, between the pagan age and the Christian one.