Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service.

I'm Simon Watts and today I'm taking you back 80 years to the start of the Spanish Civil War

and the murder of the writer Federico Garcia Lorka. In August 1936, a fascist death squad murdered the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorka.

The weeping of the guitar begins,

The goblets of dawn are smashed. The weeping of the guitar begins, impossible

to silence it. His poems like this celebration of Flamenco and plays such as Blood Wedding were inspired by rural life near the Andalusian city of Granada.

Oh, guitar.

Heart, mortally wounded by five swords.

Everybody has his own opinion what's a great poem but I think personally for me

I'm convinced that Locker is one of the great poets of this century perhaps

of any century.

Ian Gibson a biographer of Locker speaking speaking to the BBC in the 1980s.

He says the poet was inspired by those who were marginalized during Granada's bloody history.

He says somewhere that I believe that coming from Granada

gives me this deep sympathy with all those people who are suffering. The Jews

of the Moriscus, the merz, whom all Granadin is carried inside themselves.

And he's always on the side of those who are suffering or unhappy women.

Gypsies, the gypsian lock is a symbol of those who lost out, those who are living on the margins of society being persecuted.

Locker's poems about gypsies and Moors are written with vivid folk imagery that resonates immediately with most Spaniards.

His personality say his friends was equally beguiling.

Tremendously entertaining young man, but really fun and really full of life, full of humor,

full of joy, de Vivre. Tremendous charm and very human and very

...