¿Sabes dónde podría comprar una bandera republicana?

A couple months ago, I went to England to go visit my family and asked them if they wanted anything bringing from Spain. My dad had a seemingly easy request – to bring him a Spanish Republican flag. I thought this would take about a bit of work to find a flag shop or a museum that sold them, but I estimated a couple hours max. I even had my sentence all prepared – “Sabes dónde podría comprar una bandera republicana?” (Do you know where I could buy a Republican flag?) A simple, well-organized task, no?

WRONG! I ran into an astonishing number of problems.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com

Number one: being a guiri (foreigner). Now, I speak pretty good Spanish, but it’s not perfect (yet!). I work all day speaking Spanish, and I rarely run into any problems. But it’s still a work in progress, and coupled with my non-Spanish looks, it’s very obvious I’m foreign. So when I asked my very polite question, the response was “Oh, you mean this one?” with an unfurling of this:

http://www.kennuncorked.com

“No,” I replied in my best Spanish, “That’s just the Spanish flag. I mean the Civil War one. You know, the one with the purple.” The response was “Uh…you mean this one?”:

http://upload.wikimedia.org

That’s the Catalan independence flag. “No, not that one. But thank you anyway!”. Some people attempted to show me any flag they had (a regular Catalan flag, various F.C. Barcelona flags, etc. etc.), but nobody knew what I was talking about, and they thought I was a confused foreigner. One person insisted I wanted the regular Spanish flag; I explained that it couldn’t possibly be a REPUBLICAN flag as Spain has a king, so it’s a monarchy. Here’s what I was looking for, so you know it exists:

It was kind of a big deal 70ish years ago! http://www.flamesofwar.com

Finally, somebody in a museum directed me to a flag shop in Carrer de Tallers. I spent another hour looking for the shop, only to be told it had recently closed. So I gave up and went home for the day, thinking I’d find one online later. Yet again, I was wrong. They were hard to find online, as well as expensive, and none included photos, so it was impossible to tell if they would send you a terrible reproduction or a nice one. As you can imagine, my frustration levels were pretty high!

But a few days later, I had a surprise breakthrough. I’d gone to El Corte Inglés (a department store the Spanish are obsessed with) to buy lightbulbs, and just on the off-chance somebody knew, I asked the clerk. She said she didn’t know, but another guy who worked there was a staunch republican, so he might know. He knew exactly what I was talking about. Even better, he was thrilled to have a foreigner asking him such an unusual question, and directed me to his friend’s special shop on the other side of the city. But, he cautioned me, I’d have to ask quietly, as it turns out this flag has actually been banned by the Spanish monarchy! (Just in case you don’t know, ‘republicans’ in reference to the Spanish Civil War means something totally different than ‘Republicans’ in reference to the American political party. They’re the ones in the Civil War who fought against the fascists, and they had two Spanish Republics during which there was no monarchy. So it’s easy to understand why the monarchy wouldn’t be too pleased about the flag! Read George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia” for a good book about the Civil War.)

The national siesta contest! http://i.huffpost.com

This definitely made me feel better about previous failures, so I leapt on the nearest Metro and went zooming off to Sants to find this secret shop, enchanted with thoughts of a special secret store, dusty, full of secrets from the Civil War, secrets that the Spanish didn’t want to talk about. Maybe I’d see physical evidence of the pacto de olvido – the pact of forgetting, an agreement post-Civil War that the country just wasn’t going to discuss the horrific events.

Of course, as a fitting end to this misadventure, this store had also shut down. I asked in a few places about the shop and even for the guy by name, but nobody seemed to know him. Also, I’d mis-scheduled my trip – I went in the mid-afternoon. Foiled again by the siesta! 

So, I’ll ask again – anyone know where I might be able to find a Spanish republican flag? No, it’s not the same as the normal Spanish flag, it’s got a purple stripe. It’s from the Civil War. And Spain isn’t a republic.

Look, it exists! This guy on the left from the International Brigade has one! http://www.english.illinois.edu