The desecrations at Arizkun Church turn damage to a sacred place into a layered investigation: a smashed baptismal font, burned infant bones, and the possibility that a cemetery had also been violated. As Amaia Salazar and her colleagues pursue the attacks, local belief and the history of Agote segregation illuminate the stakes without establishing who committed the acts or why.

The Attacks and Their Evidence

The first attack had occurred seventeen days before Inspector Iriarte questioned the parish priest, Father Lokin. Its most clearly identified damage was the destruction of the baptismal font. When investigators later inspected the sacristy, the elderly, severely deaf chapel attendant showed them the font broken into two pieces and a bench whose splintered wood bore the marks of damage. His repeated signs of the cross and his tears as he looked at the font made the injury to the church tangible: this was not merely a damaged object to him, but an affront to the place and its rites.

The investigation also brought burned infant bones into the case. Jonan Etxaide identified them as a mairu-beso, an object whose traditional status depended on its origin: it had to come from an infant who died unbaptized. He explained the belief that such bones, carried like torches, could produce narcotic smoke and put a household or even an entire village to sleep while their bearers committed nocturnal misdeeds. In light of that identification, Iriarte observed that the case involved the desecration of both a church and a cemetery. Etxaide’s guarded reply—that this was so in the best case—left open the possibility that the implications were worse, without spelling out what further harm might have occurred.

Folklore and the Boundary of the Sacred

The mairu-beso belief tied the object’s supposed power to two conditions: the child had not been baptized, and the child had died in infancy, as a fetus, stillborn baby, or during the first months of life. The explanation given to Amaia ruled out an adult’s arm. In the tradition described, baptism marked belonging to a religious and social community; the word mairu was associated with a derogatory name for Muslims and meant non-Christian. The object therefore joined the vulnerability of an infant to the boundary between Christian inclusion and exclusion.

The account extended beyond the bone used in a desecration. Unbaptized dead infants were believed to remain between worlds, unable to enter heaven or hell or return to the limbo from which they had come. They might instead stay near their parents’ home as protective presences. Some families, according to the explanation, kept the child’s cradle or set a place and food at the table; they avoided passing the child’s clothes or name to a new sibling, lest the dead child reclaim what belonged to it. These domestic customs gave the mairu-beso tradition an intimate dimension: the same child associated with a frightening magical implement could also be imagined as a welcome, protective companion in the home.

The Agotes and the Church’s Past

During a roadside conversation, Etxaide set the investigation against competing accounts of the Agotes’ medieval origins. Historians variously connected them to persecuted Cathars, Gothic deserters who contracted leprosy in French lazarets, or a mixture of outcasts brought to serve the local feudal lord, Pedro de Ursua. Their settlement was concentrated in Bozate, and the ruined palace-fortress of the Ursua family remained in Arizkun. The explanations differed, but each placed the group’s history in the landscape around the church.

For centuries, Etxaide explained, the Agotes had been prevented from integrating into wider society. They could not live outside Bozate, run businesses, or marry people who were not Agotes. They were pushed toward woodworking and leatherworking, trades considered unclean, and required to wear a distinguishing mark sewn into their clothes; they were also made to ring a bell to announce themselves, as if they were lepers. The Church’s treatment reinforced that exclusion even though the Agotes were Christians who observed Catholic rites. They were assigned a separate baptismal font, and holy water used for them was discarded; they could be kept from the altar, directed to the back of the nave, and made to enter through a smaller, separate door.

At Arizkun, a grille had once separated Agote worshippers from the other faithful. It was later removed as a rejection of the deep shame that this history still caused among the town’s residents. Etxaide connected that past to Father Sarasola’s proposed historical explanation for the contemporary desecrations, but Amaia’s response exposed the distinction between a possible context and a demonstrated motive. The discussion supplied a history of religious exclusion; it did not prove that the attacks were committed in its name.

Investigation and Unresolved Meaning

The evidence prompted practical work as well as historical inquiry. While forensic reports on the mairu-beso remained outstanding, a patrol was stationed permanently outside the church, and no further incident had occurred by the time Amaia discussed the investigation with Iriarte. She recommended that he and Zabalza question the catechists one by one at their homes, since they might remember something the priest had missed or chosen not to mention. The suggestion broadened the inquiry beyond the parish priest without treating his account as conclusive.

The series also left a human record of damage. Father Lokin’s visible grief over the split font contrasted with the investigators’ need to document it as evidence, while the burned bones expanded the case from vandalism to possible desecration of the dead. The church’s past exclusion of the Agotes gave the attacks an unusually charged historical setting, and the mairu-beso belief supplied a second, folkloric frame. Neither frame, on the available evidence, resolves the perpetrators’ identity or purpose; the investigation remains suspended between physical damage, inherited memory, and a tradition that makes the infant remains signify more than their material form.