6 August 1936 – The Death of Josep Sunyol
Posted on | August 20, 2011 | Comments Off
On six August 1936, FC Barcelona president Josep Sunyol was captured and executed by fascist troops. His demise continues to be a grim reminder of Catalonia’s oppression below the Franco regime.
Born in 1898, Sunyol first grew to become concerned with Barça in 1926 and was elected to the Board of Directors two many years later. During that time, he was also active as a left-wing politician and journalist, using his newspaper La Rambla and his position in the Spanish legislature to oppose the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.
He was elected president of FC Barcelona in 1935. When the Spanish Civil War broke out shortly afterward, the two the club and the Catalan area have been targeted by the appropriate-wing nationalists as symbols of republican resistance. In August 1936, only one particular month into the conflict, Sunyol set out from Barcelona for a meeting with fellow republicans in Madrid. But as he handed via a Franco-held region in the Sierra de Guadarrama north of the Spanish funds, he was regarded by nationalist troops who apprehended him, then executed him. The nationalists’ anti-Catalonian sentiments ran so deep that they ordered the title on Sunyol’s gravestone to be spelled in the Castilian fashion as “Josep Suñol.”
Sunyol’s loss of life was only a tiny element of the abuses the town and club of Barcelona suffered under Franco, but he is remembered as a martyr to the Catalan cause.
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