The Lenin Barracks – George Orwell in Barcelona
Site of the Lenin Barracks (Cuartel de Lenin – formerly the Cuartel de Lepanto). The barracks were the miliary headquarters of the POUM and where George Orwell trained in Barcelona. Homage to Catalonia begins like this:
“In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table. He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend–the kind efface you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone–any man, I mean–to whom I have taken such an immediate liking. While they were talking round the table some remark brought it out that I was a foreigner. The Italian raised his head and said quickly: More here
He goes on to describe events at the Lenin Barracks where militiamen were given “what was comically called ‘instruction'” in preparation for fighting at the front.
Ver Historical memory map of Barcelona en un mapa más grande
Photo possibily featuring George Orwell from here
