Editing Guernica (section)

==Market day==
[[File:Puestos del último lunes.jpg|right|150px|thumb|Guernica marketplace]]
There is a popular saying in Guernica which runs as follows: "lunes gerniqués, golperik ez". A combination of both local languages ([[Spanish language|Castillian]] and [[Basque language|Basque]]) into a single sentence, this translates roughly as "not a stroke of work gets done on Mondays". The Monday market day has for decades been considered as a holiday in the town.

People would flock to Guernica not just from the immediate vicinity, but from all over the province, so that the town was packed. They came not just to buy or sell at the produce market, but also to eat at the town's renowned restaurants and afterwards perhaps to watch a pelota game at the local court. The Monday market has been fulfilling its age-old function of bringing people together since the times when people could not afford to travel far and it provided them with a chance to socialise. The bombing of Guernica by [[Nazi Germany]]'s ''[[Luftwaffe]]'' and the Italian [[Aviazione Legionaria]] was deliberately chosen to occur on a Monday (April 26, 1937), because it was known that the Basque people who lived outside of Guernica proper would travel into town for the Market Day, thus affording the pilots of the German and Italian aircraft the opportunity to murder as many people as possible.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Irujo |first1=Xabier |date=1 February 2017 |title=Gernika, 1937: The Market Day Massacre |url=https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/122/1/263/2967293 |journal=The American Historical Review |volume=122 |issue=1 |pages=263–264 |doi= 10.1093/ahr/122.1.263|access-date=24 July 2023}}</ref>