A Piece of History

Francisco Franco Caudillo de España por la Gracia de Dios. 1959

We've been slowly but surely organizing the upstairs in preparation for my classes this Fall.  After three coats of white, the lime-green room is bareable. ;)  That blinding green just wasn't condusive to studying!  We've hung a shelf for my books and I've begun moving things like flashcards and copies of worksheets out of the office and into the closet upstairs.

Among the things to be moved was a small, round table that we'd placed temporarily in the office.  This summer I've been giving a few classes here downstairs.

The table is nothing special.  It's very old and not necesarily well-made.  It was left in our first piso (remember when we lived in the city's teacher housing?) and for lack of furniture, we've carried it with us ever since.  It's just a crumby plywood table top that screws into an iron frame.  My suspicions that it was a throw-back from the dictatorship were all but confirmed when we had to disassemble it to get it through the doorframe of the upstairs bedroom--two 1959, 50 peseta pieces (about 30 euro cents) had been used as washers to screw the table top down!

Of course, it is likely that such creativity was a product of the currency change in 2000 when the euro came into the picture and pesetas became obsolete.  In any case, I was thrilled to uncover a little piece of history in our efforts to get the table top unscrewed!

The pesetas that went out in 2000 with the euro all had King Juan Carlos I's profile on them, since Spain had been a democratic monarchy since 1978 (although Franco died in 1975, there was a transition period during which the government was an absolute monarchy).  So perhaps we can assume this was a quiet act of retribution: it seems that someone made the concious decision not to drill a hole through the King's head...