At some point in the 1300s....a lonely Spanish guy from Bilbao, Spain (on the northern edge of the country, ended up walking from this coastal town....to a small village in central Germany.....by the name of Naurod. It's an hour's walk northeast out of Wiesbaden to reach this valley of sorts. There's not much in Naurod or the valley to get all peppy about. No castles, no fortresses, no rivers, no wine districts.....not even a fancy church (at least in that period of time.
Why he left Bilbao? No one knows. It is along the way to Saint James....the trail that Catholics took for showing their dedication to the religion. You had to stop in Bilbao....on the way to Saint James end-point.
Maybe some tired and worn-out traveler reached a point of doubting his ability to make and complete the trip, and this lonely Spanish guy volunteered to escort him back safety.
Upon arrival in Naurod....remember, it's not much of a town in those days, with a population of probably no more than 150 villagers....the guy probably stood there and watered his horse.
I doubt if they had that many strangers pass through, and there might have been a thousand questions that were thrown at the guy.
No one today knows the name of the guy. He might have been Ricardo Sanchez, or Hugo Garcia, or Ernesto Perez.
What ended up happening is that the villagers took some liking to the guy....offering up some hospitality, and for some odd reason, he stayed.
The thing is....whatever name he gave them.....just wasn't easy to remember or pronounce. So, they decided that he was the "bull-fighter" and gave him the German translation for the word.
So as the months and years went by.....his old name went by the wayside, and he accepted this nickname of sorts, which became his new Germanized name. In some ways, I would imagine that he admired the name after a while, and it probably helped in terms of catching admiration from the ladies. You know how it is with German ladies.....a regular common roofer, or a farmer, some plain old butcher....well....that's not that special. But a bull-fighter, in the midst of a German village? Oh, that's different.
So, the months, years and decades passed.
Today, it is probably one of the least known names in Germany today.....although they've been around over five-hundred years. If you did a phone search? Well....there is one such person appearing in Baviara, and a handful around the Wiesbaden area, and maybe a dozen-odd folks in Naurod itself. Because of the declining birth-rate, fewer and fewer of this name-sake will exist.
The bull-figher clan? I doubt if any of them really grasp that or take it serious.
Somewhere in the back of this whole story, there probably is some five-star story ready to be made into a movie. But you will never why this guy packed up and left, and why he stayed.....or his original name.
(Note: I am married to the descendant of the bull-fighter, but it's best not to bring this up. She gets all testy when I challenge her Germanness).
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