> About 20 years ago the Basque government began giving txoko societies money – but only if they allowed women. They are now allowed. They just aren’t allowed to cook.

Every society (another name given to txokos) has its own rules which are agreed upon by their members. There might be a vanishingly small number of societies where women are still not allowed to cook, but this an extremely rare exception rather than a widespread fact.

> sang a traditional Basque song called Hegoak (The Wings)

Note the name of the poem and later popular song is "Txoria txori"[1] (the bird is bird), which was written by Joxan Artze. The most well-known sung version is by Mikel Laboa[2].

[1] https://eu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Txoria_txori

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NW7CZxOxhI

I sadly don’t have anything personal to add on the specific topic of Basque cuisine, but I want to encourage any Indo-European language speaker who even marginally enjoys language to read up on the situation of Basque language (Euskara). It is a language isolate, and the only extant language in mainland Europe that does not descend from Proto-Indo-European. The Basque language survived in the sliver of land at the fringes of the Roman and Moorish conquests.

Not tapas, actually, but "Pintxos" (pronounced 'peen-chohs'). These are paid, they don't come for free with every beverage.

On being against the govt, technically the Basque and Navarrese "Fueros" (some kind of agreement between the people and the King) made them mostly self-managed in Spain/Iberia. There even used to be locally minted coins, customs and exeption from doing the military service.

And, on txokos, been there. They are often half-familiar/half-your-engraved-by-fire-friend-group-from-Elementary School times, forever and ever, amen.