The biologist and environmental educator Maria Galludo told yesterday in Can Ventosa the hard experience that her great-great-grandmother, Maria Roig Mayans ‘Vaca’, lived through during the Spanish Civil War. The Ibizan, a resident of sa Revista, was accused of participating in the sacking of the town’s chapel by Republican militiamen in the summer of 1936 and was imprisoned for thirteen months in Eivissa and Palma until she was acquitted in a War Council held in August 1938.
Maria Galludo discovered last year a family episode that had a great impact on her: Her great-great-grandmother, Maria Roig Mayans Vaca, was in prison during the Civil War. She told the story yesterday in Can Ventosa, at the closing ceremony of the Jornades d’Estudis Locals de Memòria Històrica del Arxiu Històric d’Ibiza i Formentera, dedicated this year to the women repressed by Franco’s regime.
It was Galludo’s grandmother, Maria Guasch Tur, who told her about the terrible experience that Maria Roig had lived through a year after the outbreak of the war. “I work in the Ses Salines Natural Park and, as my grandmother had been born and lived with her family in Sa Revista, I used to ask her a lot of questions about what this place was like in her time. One day she told me what had happened to her grandmother”, explained this biologist and environmental educator from the Institut Balear de la Natura (Ibanat) hours before giving her lecture.
Maria Roig’s story had such an impact on Galludo that this year she decided to start investigating the matter further. She wanted to know the reasons that had led her great-great-grandmother to prison, a woman who “had never been involved in political affairs” and who, nevertheless, was accused of “joining the rebellion led by the Republicans”, who between August and September 1936 tried to reconquer the islands of Mallorca and Ibiza in the war operation known as ‘Desembarco de Mallorca’ (Mallorca Disembarkation), without success.
The Ibizan biologist was helped in her research by the historian Paquita Riera, who was the one who found the military case against Maria Roig. The results of this work were published in the Sunday edition of Diario de Ibiza on the 15th of August under the title ‘La causa pel saqueig de la capella de sa Revista’.
Maria Roig lived with her husband Vicent Tur, the blacksmith from La Salinera, in a house next to the chapel of sa Revista. “My great-great-grandmother had the keys to the chapel and was in charge of cleaning it, without receiving any kind of payment in return. Inside there was a cistern and the neighbours would go there to fetch their daily jug of water,” Galludo said.
Roig was accused of “taking the bell and a table from the chapel and of saying that they had to kill two fascist women from the village”
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.