Iglesia de Arizkun is both the site of repeated desecrations and the place where an old religious boundary becomes a family mystery. The discovery of infant bones there, understood through local belief in the Mairu-beso and later linked by forensic testing to Amaia Salazar’s family, turns the church into the point where community history, ritual practice, and a concealed death converge.

Setting and Historical Divisions

The church’s history reflects the exclusion of the Agotes, a marginalized community that lived for centuries in Bozate, near Arizkun. Their origins were disputed: accounts variously traced them to religious refugees, deserters who contracted leprosy, or a mixture of outcasts brought to serve the local feudal lord. Whatever their origins, the Agotes were treated as an inferior group and restricted in where they could live, what work they could do, and whom they could marry. They were associated with woodworking and leatherwork, occupations regarded as unhealthy, and were reportedly required to wear identifying marks and ring a bell to announce their presence.

The church maintained those divisions even though the Agotes were Christians who observed Catholic rites. They had a separate baptismal font, and the holy water used for them was discarded. They could be kept at the back of the nave, barred from the altar, and directed through a smaller, separate entrance. At Iglesia de Arizkun, a grille once physically separated them from other worshippers. Its later removal expressed the community’s continuing shame over this treatment. The church thus carries a history not only of worship but also of exclusion enacted through religious space and ritual.

Desecrations and the Mairu-beso

The church becomes the focus of a series of desecrations in which human remains are found. Burned infant bones prompt Jonan Etxaide to identify them as a possible Mairu-beso: according to the belief, the object had to come from an infant who died before baptism. Folklore attributed protective and magical powers to such bones; one account held that a bearer could use them like a torch and that their smoke could put a household or even an entire village to sleep. These are reported beliefs, not established explanations for the crimes.

The tradition attached to the Mairu-beso depended on the child’s age and religious status. The dead child had to be a fetus, an aborted child, a stillborn infant, or one who died in the first months of life; an adult’s arm could not qualify. In the belief described in the investigation, an unbaptized newborn’s soul remained between worlds. Some families were said to preserve the child’s cradle or give the child a place at the table, even setting out food. They avoided giving a new sibling the dead child’s clothes or name, for fear that the spirit would reclaim what had belonged to it and take the younger child as well. At the church, this folk account makes the remains legible as more than evidence of desecration: they invoke the unsettled boundary between baptism, burial, and the fate of a child who died too soon.

Forensic Findings and Renewed Attacks

The bone analysis takes longer than usual because the authorities question the first result and order the process repeated three times. Testing begins at Nasertic and is also carried out in Zaragoza and San Sebastián; all three laboratories reach the same conclusion. The bones found at Iglesia de Arizkun belonged to a relative of Amaia Salazar, a child who was her ancestor in the fourth or fifth degree. The result changes the investigation from an inquiry into attacks on a church into a search through Amaia Salazar’s own family history.

The desecrations recur while the analysis is under way. Investigators receive word of another attack and return to the church, where Doctor San Martín uncovers bones laid on the altar beneath a metallic blanket. Their appearance differs from that of the earlier remains. The altar, a central sacred furnishing, has become the place where evidence is exposed; the discovery renews both the inquiry into the attacks and the question of what kind of remains have been brought into the church.

From Church Evidence to Family Secret

The forensic connection leads Amaia Salazar to investigate her mother’s records. A file lists a twin birth in 1980 to Rosario Iturzaeta: two girls, apparently healthy, but with no names recorded. A separate death certificate identifies a newborn daughter of Rosario Iturzaeta and Juan Salazar and gives the cause as crib death. The records do not settle what happened. The certificate and the family’s recollections contain inconsistencies, and the relatives had not even known that the child was born; those who attended the burial saw a closed coffin and did not see the body.

Amaia Salazar recognizes that the bones found in the church may belong to the twin whose birth was concealed. She identifies the hidden birth, the irregular documentation, and the remains’ discovery in suspicious circumstances as interlocking reasons to doubt the accepted account of the child’s death and burial. Iglesia de Arizkun therefore serves as the hinge between two kinds of suppressed history: the public memory of a community segregated within a church, and the private concealment of a newborn whose identity and fate were withheld from her family.