Is it true that the photograph shows the poet García Lorca reciting poetry before being shot?

A photo has been circulating on the Internet for many years, allegedly capturing one of the most famous Spanish poets moments before his execution. We checked whether Federico García Lorca is in the photo.

The photograph shows a man standing against a wall, with two uniformed soldiers taking aim at him. The photo is usually captioned with the words “Poet García Lorca reads poetry before being shot. Spain, 1936”, bypassed some entertainment resources (“Peekaboo", Creozavr), but gained particular popularity in social networks: in particular, on Facebook (there are publications with 2500 And 1000 reposts at the time of writing the analysis), on VKontakte (publics “History of the world | historical facts» — 34,000 views, The Gentleman — 29,000 and “History of Humanity” — four post With general audience in 65,000 views), as well as in Telegram (on channels Black History — 84,000 views, "Classified" - 75,000, "Film"- 72,000 and Dark History - 57,000).

Hispanic Federico Garcia Lorca He devoted half of his short (38 years) life to a literary career: he experimented with various forms - from poetry to plays, turned to history and traditions, and his creative legacy to this day has a huge influence on art in the Spanish-speaking world and beyond. However, for many people outside Spain, almost the only fact they know about Lorca remains his tragic death in 1936 during the Civil War at the hands of those who unleashed the rebellion Francoists. Particular attention was paid to this event in the Soviet Union - against the backdrop of many years of ideological confrontation with the Franco dictatorship, Soviet literary criticism, according to words Dmitry Bykov, “stubbornly made Lorca almost a socialist (in reality, he was rather apolitical).” The most venerable people dedicated poems to Lorca Soviet poets, his biography was published in the series “Life of wonderful people", and in 1986 the television play "Death of the poet"

For many years, the understanding of the circumstances of the death of Federico García Lorca was based mainly on assumptions and stories of unconfirmed eyewitnesses. This was primarily due to the fact that the Francoists tried to hide traces of their participation in the incident by publishing information that did not correspond to reality. When, in 1937, a Mexican journalist asked Franco himself a bold question: “Have you shot well-known writers?” replied: “There is a lot of talk abroad about the writer from Granada (Lorca was born and died in this Spanish province. - Ed.); they say a lot because the Reds are waving this name around as propaganda bait. The truth is that in the first minutes of the revolution in Granada, this writer died along with the rebels; These are natural accidents of war. Granada was besieged for many days, and the madness of the republican authorities, who distributed weapons to the people, generated sparks within, from one of which the poet from Granada died. His loss as a poet was unfortunate, and Red propaganda made a banner out of this accident, exploiting the sensibility of the intellectual world."

Many decades passed, and only in 2015, documents from the dossier on the Lorca case, published on the website of the leading Spanish radio station Cadena SER, made it possible to bring some clarity to the picture of what happened. It all started when in 1965, the French writer Marcel Auclair, a good friend of Lorca, submitted a request to the Spanish embassy in Paris regarding the circumstances of the poet’s death. Auclair, who was working on the book “The Life and Death of Garcia Lorca,” never received a report from the embassy. However, 50 years later, the origin of this request became public knowledge. correspondence Ministers of the Interior and Foreign Affairs of Spain, as well as the subsequent report Higher Police Authority of Granada. Thanks to him we know about the next chain of events.

In July 1936, shortly before the start of the civil war, the poet, amid growing tensions in the country, decided to leave Madrid to join his family in his native Andalusia, to the estate of Huerta de San Vicente. Literally three days later, a military mutiny occurred, and power in the province of Granada passed to the nationalists, who enjoyed the support of the army. According to the report, after two searches took place at García Lorca's house, he became worried and decided to take refuge in the house of his friends, the pro-Franco Rosales brothers, where he was eventually arrested on the evening of August 16. There could have been several reasons for the arrest - for example, Lorca was suspected of being a socialist “due to the nature of his speeches and connections with other important persons of the same political affiliation.” Also in the document, the poet was called a “Mason” and “a homosexual, although there is no exact data on any specific case.” Further, as stated in the report, Lorca was placed in the civil administration building, from where, on the eve of the execution, he was transferred to the Granada town of Viznar. Near this locality, in the rural area of ​​Fuente Grande, on the night of August 18-19, he was shot along with three other detainees. The poet was buried, as stated, “in a ravine 2 km from Fuente Grande.” According to the report, a more precise burial place could not be determined. It is unknown to this day, despite numerous excavations.

So, it is more or less reliably known that Federico Garcia Lorca was shot in an open area, and not in something resembling a closed prison yard, as in the photograph. It happened at night, and in the photo we see natural light. The appearance of the person in the photo also raises questions. Here's how looked Lorca in July 1936, a few days before his death:

Before us are two people completely different in hair type and color:

Where did the popular shot of the shooting of Federico García Lorca come from?

In 2011, the Spanish punk rock band Boikot released a video for the song Lagrimas de Rabia (“Tears of Fury”), dedicated to the events of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent decades of life under the Franco dictatorship. At the same time, a 15-minute documentary of the same name was released movie, in which footage from the clip alternated with footage from interviews with various witnesses to those events. The group pays great attention attention this topic - at her concerts often hanging flags Second Spanish Republic and shout anti-fascist slogans.

According to the plot of the clip, an elderly school teacher tells his students (judging by the inscription on the blackboard) about a collection of poems called “Wind of the people"(1937) by Miguel Hernandez - another writer who became a victim of the Franco regime in 1942. The first poem in this collection is dedicated to the memory of Federico García Lorca, whose name is also indicated on the plaque. At this time, people in uniform burst into the classroom and take the teacher away, and at the climax of the video, the teacher reciting freedom-loving poetry is shot. In this case, you can see a frame that matches a photo popular on the Internet. And although it’s impossible to say that this is Federico Garcia Lorca (neither the real one, nor even as the hero of the video), at least with 2015 A screenshot from a music video on social networks began to be accompanied by a caption about a Spanish poet allegedly reading his latest poems. As we see, a similar misconception exists in our days, despite many glaring inconsistencies with Lorca's actual biography.

Cover photo: social networks

Not true

What do our verdicts mean?

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