La Pasionaria

Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (9 December 1895 - 12 November 1989), known more famously as "La Pasionaria" (passion flower) was a Spanish Republican leader of the Spanish Civil War and communist politician of Basque origin. She is perhaps best known for her defense of the Second Spanish Republic with the famous slogan ¡No Pasarán! ("They Shall Not Pass"), during the Battle of Madrid.

Dolores Ibárruri was born to a local Basque miner and a Castillian mother. She grew up in Gallarta, but upon her marriage to the revolutionary socialist miner Julián Ruiz Gabiña, Ibárruri moved to Somorrosto (Biscay). It was here, during the 1920s, that the once Carlist Catholic young woman became a revolutionary militant activist and one of the first members of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) when it was founded in 1921. In the 1930s, she became a writer for the PCE publication Mundo Obrero, and was elected to the Cortes as a PCE deputy for Asturias in February 1936 during the Second Republic.She is usually regarded as being one of the greatest public speakers of the twentieth century.

In October 1938 in an address to the International Brigades she bide them farewell as follows -

Comrades of the International Brigades! Political reasons, reasons of state, the good of that same cause for which you offered your blood with limitless generosity, send some of you back to your countries and some to forced exile. You can go with pride. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of the solidarity and the universality of democracy? We will not forget you; and, when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves, entwined with the laurels of the Spanish Republic's victory, come back!


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If you have time, I have a backblip of a special war memorial overlooking the River Clyde