Day 3 : confronting history

Day 3 : confronting history, originally uploaded by raoul_dewinne.

At the end of the second day I impressed my wife by checking us in at the "Grand Hotel Moderne". Although I'm generally sceptic when businesses emphasize their qualities too obviously I had to give them the benefit of the doubt since the building had quite an impressing appearance from the outside. However, the inside brought us back with our two feet on the ground : our room was neither grand and worse it was a far cry from modern and it was equipped with a completely antiquated shower where the temperature of the water seemed to be controlled by a malicious neighbour.



Not that our rooms were better the day after when we stayed in one of the oldest monasteries of the world, but the monastery didn't make any claims, nor did we expect any either. Or, how a pilgrimage can remind you of the common wisdom that contentment is inverse prortional to your expectations...



Indeed, on day 3 we stayed at the Abbey of Saint Martin at Liguge, which was founded in 361!



On our way we also passed another historical place: the battlefield of the famous "battle of Poitiers". On October 10, 732, the Frankish forces under Charles Martel defeated a massive invading Muslim army that outnumbered the Franks by far. This battle seems surprisingly known as the Battle of Tours in English-speaking countries.

The battle followed twenty years of Muslim conquests in Europe, beginning with the invasion of the Visigoth Christian Kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula in 711 and progressing into the Frankish territories of Gaul, former provinces of the Roman Empire. Martel's victory is believed by many historians to have stopped the northward advance of Muslims from the Iberian peninsula, and is therefore also considered of macrohistorical importance in that it halted the Muslim conquests and preserved Christianity as the controlling faith in Europe during a period when Muslim rule was overrunning the remains of the old Roman and Persian Empires. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

The Camino has always been linked to this confrontation of two cultures and religions in so much that by the 10th century St. James was regarded as the protector of Christian Europe against the Muslim Moors.

Unfortunately, more than one millenium later these battles still seem to continue in different forms and different places... As if history likes to repeat itself or is it human nature that hasn't changed that much?

The current memorial on those ancient battlegrounds had several wise words carved into the tiles of a giant checkerboard. One of them said: "I believe in the religion of love..." and another one: "People make ennemies of what they are ignorant of." When reading those words we smiled at each other since - albeit on a much much smaller scale - we experienced by ourselves that it takes love and respect to overcome the separation between two different cultures. And one has to start by taking an interest in each other, since confrontation with a foreign culture can be a very enriching experience - but true, it requires an effort on both sides. And Maggie (Wei Wen) summed it all up by reflecting that she cannot make a white calligraphy on white paper - white paper needs as much the black ink as the black ink needs the white paper. Food for thought indeed - it must have been the influence of this 1600 year old abbey :-)



By now it is exactly midnight and tomorrow the monks will wake us up at six :-( Our longest day trip is impatiently waiting for us, 108km, and to make it a real pilgrimage, we might be singing in the rain tomorrow - but saint Goretex will protect us :-)

Have a great weekend and check out on us again next Monday, we'll go on a weekend as well and guess what we will be doing...