My Burgundy Your Burgundy History, culture and nature

August 23, 2015

A short wander around Auxerre

Filed under: Culture,History — admin @ 4:18 am

And some random pictures – but this is a town with lots, and lots and lots of medieval houses … great atmosphere.

timber1 timber2

And a fine cathedral, with lots of carvings a little battered around, but still in pretty good condition….

cathedralIncluding a nice ark …

noah

And it lays claim to the fact that Joan of Arc passed through …

joanIt’s a town that likes to commemorate its famous characters, among whom perhaps the most sympathetic is Marie Noel.

marienoelSimilarly commemorated is Cadet Rousselle, a rather less sympathetic figure.

And it has a clocktower in the middle of town, as most cities and towns in this region seem to …

clocktowerThere’s also an excellent independent bookstore just down from the cathedral.

August 23, 2014

The museum at Nuits-Saint-Georges, near Beaune

Filed under: Culture,History — admin @ 3:17 pm

In the middle of the wine riches of the Cote d’Or, with fine dining and expensive vintages being pushed from every angle, and the beauties of the vineyards marching across the valleys and slopes, it’s perhaps not surprising that on an August afternoon my companion and I found ourselves the only people in the museum at Nuits-Saint-Georges.

But it is a bit of a pity, for while it isn’t huge, it has an interesting, nicely contained, story to tell about a significant settlement that grew up in the 1st century BC, and largely died at the end of the 4th century AD, although with a continuing smaller presence (known through the cemetery) in the Merovingian period. The collapse was so complete that its ancient name has been lost and the archaeological site, which first came into evidence in the 19th-century is known as Bolards, after the medieval landowner of the region.

It seems that this was very much a trading town, on the northern edge of the Eduen (Adui) territory, on the routes from Besancon to Lyon and Autun to Geneva.

The prosperity was probably modest, but very real, evidenced by the real quite decently carved gravestones that mark the centrepiece of the exhibition, in an historic cellar.

tomb

The gowns and tunics drape really very well, and symbols of their trades, for each figure carries one in each hand – speak of scribes (or perhaps lawyers?) and builders, traders and perhaps priests. There are around 100 recorded from the town’s two cemeteries –  small provincial elite.

besttomb

This is probably the grandest of them – the old man handing over a sack of coins to what may be his son, or might be his wife…

Two are far simpler – were these the poorer citizens with pretensions or those dying at the very start or end of the thriving of this mystery town, when standards were far lower?

simpletombstone

At the centre of the town – and no doubt important to its prosperity – was a giant temple, its precincts covering 3,600 square metres, which was no doubt a centre of pilgrimage. It seems to have hedged its bets – having served a number of deities, including these three Gaulish gods (the one on the right three-faced, wearing a head-dress of deer antlers). While just outside its walls were the first temple to Mithras found in France (they’ve since been many more of course), and another to Cybele.

gaulgods

 

Venus also must have been an object of worship – there’s a lovely collection of small votive statues to her, featuring many different hairstyles: possibly a carver with a sense of adventure, or who was just bored…

venus

The Merovingian section is small but illustrative. There are several burials, which give a very strong sense of the simplified life: one has the essentials, a sword, a beltbuckle (no doubt part of the burial costume), and a small clay offering vessel, like one of these …

merovingianpots

Although for the richer glass was still a possibility…

merovingianglass

Pottery technology had undoubtedly declined, although this article has an interesting discussion of the quality of metalwork in varying periods.

There’s one example here of what I think of a typical sign of the Merovingians – their sarcophagi: simple but impressive. (There are several in the church in Anost.)

merovingiansarcophagus

Two practical notes: the museum is near the pedestrianised centre of town, and not particularly well sign-posted. Probably easiest to park in the free parking in that area and head out on the Dijon road. Look for the signs to the Bibliotheque, which is beside it and rather better highlighted. If you want to see the archaeological site itself, there are guided tours doing the Jours de Patromoine in September.

August 21, 2014

France’s “new” (really!) medieval castle at Guedelon

Filed under: Culture,History — admin @ 1:35 pm

The idea of building a new medieval castle, using entirely medieval methods – it’s one of those strokes of initiative that either disappears into a mire of debt, cost-overruns and recriminations, or works out brilliantly.

At Guedelon, 27 years after the project commenced, it’s clear that the latter is the case.

There’s what looks very like a well-on-the-way-to-finished castle (scheduled completion date 2024) …

tower

whole

 

And here’s the final plan…

plan

We can thank, ultimately, King Philippe II of France for this: he standardised designs of castles along these lines around all of his kingdom – Ratilly and Druyes-les-Belles-Fontaines are two surviving examples in this region.

Some facts and figures: the great tower is 28.5 metres tall; the final construction will have 28,000 (all handmade) tiles, the total weight will be about 60,000 tonnes.

But work is still going on every day – here’s some water being hauled up to the masons …

wall

The whole thing feels impressive authentic. There are some modern concessions – everyone wears steel-capped boots (probably hard to justify crushed/amputated toes today) and there are some (cloth-covered) hard hats around, I guess for the stone-lifting, but otherwise the buckets are of wood, the lime is made on site (with the different mixes – for mortar and render) written on the walls to remind the masons.

Oh and there are safety googles – but all the labour is by hand … the rough shaping …

rough

And the final finishing …

smooth

Here’s what must have been some of the early work, above the kitchen door – not sure if the lintel and arch combined as a second thought or just for extra strength – there’s a great hall on top of this…

lintels

And here’s what the kitchen looks like inside: rather taken with the “shelves” slung with ropes, nifty design … and of course there’s a bread oven beside the fire, and a spit for roasting the venison …

kitchen

At the other side of the courtyard (lots of carrying!) is the well – essential in any siege-resistant castle. The chapel is on the floor above (not yet finished).

wellThe quality of the workmanship is quite something to behold – when you actually see these being made in the workshops of the masons you appreciate the skill involved. (And they’re also multilingual – had a good explanation from a mason as to why you use a totally rounded hammer rather than a square one: less energy to swing and less likely to bounce off if you strike slightly awry.)

windowAnd within the castle itself, it looks like there’s not been a nail used – all of the joints are secured with wooden pegs…

And the tools handmade too…

hammer

There are some nails used in the bridge across the moat, but certainly handmade…

nails

jointIncluding what I think is the hammerbeam roof in the great hall…

hammerbeam

And the shingles are handmade…

shingles

The small room off the wall is decorated in traditional style with natural ochres… and very attractive to0…

fresco

fresco2

There’s also the “village”, where traditionally dyeing is under way, chickens are being reared in heavenlike conditions for chickens, and of course the “horsepower” lives…

horse

And the veggies are grown behind a style of fence I’m thinking of trying to copy…

fence

 

In short, an excellent place to spend a day. It now gets 300,000 visitors a year, but they spread out nicely…

 

August 7, 2011

L’Alice – wonderful film, wonderful life

Filed under: Culture,History,Nature — admin @ 2:20 am

To a packed salle de fete in Etang sur Arroux for a showing of a documentary film, L’Alice, a fly-on-the-wall style documentary about the life of a woman farmer in the hamlet of Dront, near Anost, in the Morvan.

Alice Dumont, in this film made between 2006 and 2008, is a widow who runs a traditional farm with her odds job man Pierrot Garnet. (I should preface all of the following by saying that a large part of the French of the film was too colloquial and too fast for me – I mostly got by through looking at the pictures, and while that meant I missed a lot of the laughs, I still got a huge amount out of it, but I may have got some details askew.)

There are ducks and geese and hens, all fed, as Alice tells us, on proper grains, none of that pellet stuff; cattle and sheep (and the scene with Alice massaging the tongue of a milking cow, which chews on her hand as gently and affectionately as a puppy, is an unforgettable image of inter-species understanding); rabbits, a traditional source of protein in the Morvan – there are cages still in my garden; and plentiful vegetables (we see Alice transplanting the lettuce seedlings, hard work at any age). And of course cats and rather plump dogs, and horses around, although apparently no longer in working use.

This is country life – almost no scenes barred from the camera, including animal death and human mourning. It was interesting that the audience, pretty well entirely local, gasped and exhibited shock at the killing of a rabbit by the traditional method here – it was stunned by a punch to the head, having been held upside down until it was still, then the throat cut with a thin-bladed knife. Yet there’s much compassion and care for the animals – Alice practically talks to them and they appear to understand, most notably in a scene where some hens wander through the house.

The audience were interestingly also rather uncomfortable with the making of blood sausages – into pig intestines, then boiled in an outside vat; something that was probably one of the highlights of their parents’ year, and certainly something Alice and her friends much enjoyed.

So the life is fascinating, as a fast-disappearing, but highly sustainable and ecologically sound one (I’d love to be able to put together some of the older people still living this life with some groups I know of that are trying to in effect re-create it from scratch, because I think at the moment there’s little communication, but much that could be learnt).

But it’s also a wonderful human and often also wonderfully funny story. The scene of a cat clambering backwards down a snowy ladder in mid-winter; Alice’s discovery of the accident of ploughing that left lettuce seedlings wandering across the field; neighbours getting together in cheery if rather alcohol-fueled fraternity.

And the total star is Alice herself – her energy and enthusiasm for life are breathtaking. The scene of her chasing at full speed runaway cattle through the forest – well one can only wish to be capable of that at 80. And she’s clearly someone who’s suffered a lot in her life – her husband I gathered was killed in a tractor accident, and since then she’s carried on the vast work of the farm almost single-handed (inside and outside work), with only the rather limited help of Pierre.

She’s utterly unself-conscious in front of the camera – utterly comfortable with herself and who she is – and director Alice Comode has done a wonderful job of bringing it all together. She was at the showing and indicated, I believe, in questions afterwards that Alice died last year –

One Facebook commentary describes the film as “une formidable leçon de vie”, which I think sums it up pretty well. Even if you don’t understand a word of French, it’s a film you could get a lot out of.

More about the film.

April 3, 2011

Ecouter le Monde… Sculptor Bernard Dejonghe at the Bibracte Museum

Filed under: Culture,History,Nature — admin @ 3:46 pm

When I read that Bibracte Museum was not going to have an archaeological exhibition this year I was disappointed. I much enjoyed last year’s Gallic heads exhibition, and the previous year’s La Tene display, and was looking forward to something similar. (The Museum also traditionally has an annual small modern art exhibition, but I’ll confess none have stuck in my memory.)

But after seeing Ecouter le Monde (Listening to the World), by sculptor Bernard Dejonghe, I am disappointed no longer. To start with it is not just modern art, but it starts, temporally if not physically, in the far distant past, with astonishing curiosities from North African deserts.

Among these are pieces what is known as Libyan desert glass, thought (although this is still a subject of much controversy) to have been formed by meteorite impact some 26 million years ago.

There are also fulgerites, formed by lightning strikes on sand, millions of joules of energy trapped in fragile equilibrium.

fulgerites

And then there’s the grand daddy of geological moment, 77 fragments of the meteorite gathered from Tafassasset in Niger, gathered by the artist over three expeditions and arranged here from largest to smallest like the tail of a comet. The massive heat of the force of the passage through the atmosphere is visible on some of the pieces.
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October 2, 2010

Was this what a Druid looked like? The Gaullish head exhibition at Bibracte (“Les Gaulois font la tête”)

Filed under: Culture,History — admin @ 4:01 pm

It’s a tenet of archaeological faith that the Celts had a primarily non-figurative art, but the current exhibition at Bibracte, the museum at the Eduen capital that was later replaced by nearby Roman Autun, focuses on what can be found from across the continent.

Its basic thesis is that the most dominant objects, sculpted heads, occasionally in wood (but how many might have survived?) but more commonly in stone, probably represent a cult of ancestor worship, the subsequent understanding being hopelessly warped by the Greco-Roman religious perspective on which most of our written knowledge of the Celtic civilisation is based. It says we can’t know if they had a funerary function, or votive, but were certainly meant to provide magical protection, security and prestige to their community.

In smaller items, handles for metal vessels, swords, jewelery and the like, there’s figures in which the vegetable is transforming into human forms. The catalogue suggests these represent a form of metamorphosis, a suggestion that the metaphysical is present always in the everyday.

(I learnt,which I hadn’t previously known, that the Celts often believed in reincarnation.)

The other thing about Celts and heads is that they seem to have been rather fascinated with skulls, not just, perhaps the taking of heads in battle, but beyond that. There’s quite a number here, including a particularly gory one with a nail driven through it, whether pre or post mortem isn’t clear – perhaps for display on a wall? The exhibition reports that fragments of craniums were carried in amulets. In one case a buried body was left whole after the face was carefully cut out.
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July 22, 2010

The ‘Fete du crapiaux’ at St Prix

Filed under: Culture,History — admin @ 8:39 am

Despite the fact that I can’t eat crepes (gluten), the thought of a pleasant ride (10km or so from La Grande-Verriere) through glorious countryside on Sunday, with a country fair at the end of it, was irresistible.

And I didn’t regret those hills – it was a lovely local, social occasion, just like country things you read about from decades ago in England.

The flashest, most “modern” thing was two bouncy castles, whose operators were looking pretty glum and unoccupied.

What was really going down well with the under 10s were these wonderful old pedalcarts … lots of fun was being had.

horse pedal carts

But for those too big for those, the band was the thing – three accordians, two bagpipes, and a wind-up thing that looked kind of like a mandolin (no idea what it is called in French or English). I was very impressed at how many people seemed to know the traditional dances!

And the other main grown-up entertainment (well other than drinking and chatting) were two simple, but very challenging, games.
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Permaculture and fruit porn

Filed under: Culture,Nature — admin @ 8:02 am

Yesterday, just down the road from me, I visited the most amazing garden – a permaculture garden that’s just laden with fruit and bulging with life (they can even grow cabbages without slug pellets because the ducks eat the attackers).

It’s the home of Uni Vers Terre, (website now down, but hopefully temporarily) where they are trying to promote permaculture, with regular courses in that, and in collective consensus decisionmaking, and there’s also thinking about a developing a local movement something like the British Transition Towns movement. I also learnt that efforts are being made to develop a local currency.

They also sell at the Friday market in Autun Kombucha (fermented tea – I had a glass and definitely recommend it), dried fruits, and also jams and conserves.

I got lots of advice on what to grow in my garden – and the possibilities are amazing – and recommendations for lots of websites, around which I’ve been pleasantly grazing as the rain falls outside (can’t complain, it has refilled the empty water tank). The fruit possibilities are endless, and look great.

Recommended were Daniel Duret, Proeftuin and Multibaies, while I also found this useful listings page, which led me to Tropicaflore, which looks rather good.

I also learnt the term basin phyto plante (or phyto-epuration), which is, more or less, the translation for “reed bed”, as used in water treatment – what I hope to install instead of a septic system, combined with a composting loo.

It was a nice pair for my visit to the organic vegetable garden in La Celle en Morvan, where with a similar philosophy and principles, they are growing, selling and promoting traditional varieties and methods.
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July 14, 2010

A visit to Chalon-sur-Saone

Filed under: Culture,History — admin @ 9:49 am

Chalon-sur-Saone is Burgundy’s second-biggest city. Its primary claim to tourist fame is its old centre, with its half-timbered and sometimes highly decorated shop houses. It’s a pity though that what’s on street level now is a rather prosaic collection of the usual chain stores, with their identikit fronts, which take away any sense of atmosphere.

Chalon-sur-Saone cathedral square

This is on the main square facing the cathedral (much hacked about and really quite dull – a lovely piece of stained glass in the sacristry window being one of its few claims to fame. This detail shows one of the beasts of the Apocalypse).

Chalon-sur-Saone cathedral stained glass

Museum-wise, the central place to go is the Denon, in the home of one of the town’s most famous sons, which boasts a fine (if rather crowded) archaeological collection in its basement. There’s a particular focus on the river, key to life her for millennium, and the source of many of the finds.

There’s an almost complete 14th-century boat, seriously evocative, and Roman wharf timbers, but the item that really grabbed me was the slave’s padlock and chain – from the Gallo-Roman period, so more than 2,000 years ago this was holding, with a chain around his or her arm, one no-doubt miserable member of a line of slaves to the next. (Or possibly one slave to a captor?) It’s the sort of thing that you could build a whole novel from.

slave padlock

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April 4, 2009

A spring walk around Monthelie and Mersault on the Cote d’Or

Filed under: Culture,History — admin @ 2:26 pm

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