Guernica is a town in the Basque Country in northern Spain. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, German planes bombed it and much of the town was destroyed. The Basque name is Gernika; Spanish and English usually write Guernica. The world knows the name especially because Pablo Picasso painted a huge, grey, broken picture of the attack, also called Guernica. When English speakers say the word, they may mean the town, the bombing, or the painting — and quite often they mean the painting first. Though actually the painting is not a photograph of the streets; it is Picasso’s way of showing pain, fear, and ruin. The town was real, and so was the bombing.

格爾尼卡（常指畢卡索那幅畫）