Jumping off a pont

Though I am far from completely comfortable in French, there are many words and phrases that I’ve picked up here that have infiltrated my English, as they are simply better, or more evocative than their English equivalents. Today, as I was out this morning taking photos for tomorrow’s post, another occurred to me.

Even though it was 9:00 AM on a Monday morning, the city was absolutely dead. This is because of a delightful French tradition called “le pont.” Tomorrow, of course, is La fête nationale, a.k.a. the Bastille Day holiday. As it is on a Tuesday, many French take Monday as a “bridge” (pont) between the weekend, thus creating a four week holiday.

The practice isn’t unheard of elsewhere, but France is the first place I encountered that has a special word for it (though I’m told Spaniards use the word “aqueduct” – with its multiple arches - for when one takes, say, a Wednesday, has a holiday on Thursday, then the last span of Friday vaulting one to the weekend.

The “pont” is not just for slackers, either. I’ve a friend who works for a company that makes laser-fabricated yo-yos here in Strasbourg (don’t ask). He is required to take the pont, even though it isn’t an official holiday.

I haven't abandoned the tour! The photo above isn't intended as a insult to the French: it's tucked into a high alcove on a building on Rue de l'Epine. Apparently, young maidens desiring a husband would rub it for luck. I like how they even painted the reeds of a little marsh behind it, to make it feel at home.

There's no place like heim: everything you wanted to know about Alsatian farmhouses but were afraid to ask

_{Swiss-influenced homes in Buswiller}

One of the most striking features of Alsatian architecture is what I call the “half-timbered house” – I don’t know what the proper terminology for this style is. I think it is better known in the English speaking world as “Tudor-style” but that seems awfully Anglo-centric, so I don’t use it.

In any case, these houses are by far the dominant style of home in the villages of Alsace, especially on the Rhine plain. They’re a little less common in Strasbourg (with the exception of the Petit France neighbourhood, which I’ll get to later) whose generally wealthier residents opted for stone buildings after the 1700s.

I never thought too much about them until this Saturday, when one of Amynah’s colleagues took Amynah, myself and our two guests on a tour of his home region of Kochersberg. K-berg is a sub-region of France (there are many hundreds of them) just to the northwest of Strasbourg.

We arrived in Rafaël’s home village of Offenheim, where we enjoyed a light lunch of goat cheese, bread, cherries, and apple juice behind his family’s farmhouse. The house had been erected in 1788, and had a keystone over the door with the date inscribed. The bit on the stone where the family name had been was chipped off. Rafaël explained that this might have been due to the offending presence of a crown in the decorations, which became a dangerous choice of ornament the following year.

After the lunch, and a quick tour of the inside of Rafael’s house (which I desperately regret not snapping photos of) we set off on the tour of Kochersberg.


_{The downside of a roadside location: this chapel was all that remains of a village wiped off the map in the thirty years war}

I can’t do justice to the tour – Rafaël is a knowledgeable and passionate guide, speaking with equal ease on linguistic, political, and architectural history. He covered more than I could possibly relate here, leading us through an scrambled alphabet of Alsatian villages: Quatzenheim, Nordheim, Duntzenheim, Zutzendorf and Buswiller, among others.

Those names reflect the different cultures that have had an impact on Alsatian culture: the “heim” suffix is derived from “home” in German, while “willer” comes from the Roman “villa.” Other names, like the “Kocher” in “Kochersberg” comes from the old Celtic languages. The mix leads to some odd combinations: “Berg” apparently means hill in Alsatian, while “Kocher” means hill in Celtic, making Rafaël’s region “Hill hill.” Stranger still, there were very few hills in evidence worthy of the name.

Another interesting fact Rafaël passed on was that during the Reformation, Alsatians organized themselves into Protestant and Catholic villages. The region’s large Jewish population generally chose to live in the Protestant villages, where they lived unmolested by the Inquisition, free to construct half-timbered synagogues for themselves.


_{House being refurbished in Quatzenheim: straw and clay filling visible. Finished product in the background}

The Protestant villages generally ended up being wealthier than their Catholic counterparts, by grace of the French Revolution. When the revolutionary government in Paris nationalized Catholic Church property, and then sold it to raise funds, the Church forbade its members to buy. Protestant farmers suffered from no such prohibition, and were therefore free to enlarge their holdings.

Now, to the buildings themselves: Alsatian homes in Rafaël’s region were constructed around a large courtyard, with a gate at one end. Rafaël’s home had a large stable running along one side, a hay barn along another, a third barn next to the house on the third side. Additionally, they had a small distillery for making shnapps (Eau de vie – “water of life” – in French) from the fruits grown on their property.

The homes themselves were large, and designed for a multi-generation family. In fact, Rafaël lives with his parents and grandparents, among furniture that has been in the family since before Louis XVI parted company with his head. The structures are designed for flexibility – the beams and the clay-straw mix are easy to disassemble and rearrange. That way when a marriage created a new family unit, they could be accommodated under the same roof.

To the untutored eye, once Alsatian house looks much like another. But they were not merely homes to their inhabitants – they were expressions of their hopes, their fears, their beliefs and their personal idiosyncrasies. The pattern of the beams expressed different folk beliefs: at an angle was an appeal fertility, curved crosses prevented fire, diamond shapes warded off the evil eye. Beams were decorated with faces, ogres, flowers, or simply strands of wheat. Other houses carved the names of the owners into the beams.


_{The holy of holies}

At one point in the tour, we were joined by Rafaël’s friend Daniel, and another man whose name I didn't catch. All three were passionate conservationists – Daniel owned three Alsatian homes that he was restoring. At one point, we stopped outside of a home formerly owned by a University of Strasbourg professor, who had been president of the local conservation society. The three men stood outside it, struck silent with a reverent awe, like a Beatles fan at the Abbey Road crosswalk, or a climber seeing Everest for the first time. The man had installed traditional windows, old-style tiles, and locally-made doors. But the home was not just an exercise in creating an impersonal, frozen relic: in the central beam on the façade, he had carved his and his wife’s name, together with their wedding date.


_{Buswiller prospect}

Our final stop was Buswiller, a tiny hamlet just north of Kochersberg (in an area whose name translated as “bush land,” according to Rafaël). This village, away from the tourist routes and far enough away from Strasbourg to deter property re-developers, is apparently the best-preserved village of typical Alsatian architecture. As an added bonus, there were some rare Swiss-influenced homes on display as well – one of which had been on the market for over a year, much to Daniel’s disbelief. I mean, who wouldn't want to live in Buswiller?

Foxy boxing

_{Yes, I know my handwriting is a crime against the epistolary arts}

Well, the great postbox mystery of 2009 is semi-solved – I had put the card in the mailbox Monday night, and by Wednesday, it had returned to me, bearing the cancellation mark of La Poste. Of course, I still have no idea why the French postal system operates a Royal Mail box in Strasbourg. I’m considering putting another postcard in there with a pen attached, and a post-it bearing asking whatever postal employee whose job it is to empty this box to explain it to me. Or would that be crazy?

As long as I’m writing this, I might as well explain where the postcard itself came from. Last week, one of the PhD students in Amynah’s lab successfully defended his dissertation, thus becoming “Dr X” (for real – his first name is Xavier. If either of my names started with X, I’d get a PhD, recruit some henchmen, buy some lasers, and insist on being called called “Dr X.”) As is the custom, there was a celebratory dinner afterwards, at a restaurant called “Au Renard Prechant.” Roughly half the restaurant is in an old chapel.


_{The restaurant: you can see the old chapel windows on the right side. Image from over here.}

I arrived late, as I was coming from an English tutorial (in which I was the tutor, not the tutee), and ended up sitting at the end of the table with Alain, Amynah’s boss’s husband, and Celia, a colleague of Amynah’s. I ordered some kind of fish stuffed with cabbage - it was excellent.

Now, “Renard Prechant” translates as “The preaching fox.” Strasbourg’s proselytizing predator evidently had quite an impact on the people of the city – in addition to the restaurant, there are two streets named after it. Curious, I asked Alain if he knew where the name came from. He didn’t, and flagged the owner over to our table: “My friend here is a Canadian, and a species of journalist. He wants to know how the restaurant got its name,” he asked, in French.

Thrilled to be speaking to “a species of journalist,” the restaurateur bustled off, returning with a postcard (the very one pictured above!), and a photocopied newspaper article. In the 19th century, according to the card, the street which passes by the restaurant was a canal that connected the Ill river to the Rhine. The building was occupied by a certain Mr Fuchs (which means Fox), who made his living by fishing from the water than ran by his home. This means was insufficient for him to feed his family however, and so he decided to “liberate” some ducks that were the property of his neighbour.

He was caught and sentenced for the theft. In what the postcard described “revenge,” the entire story was immortalized by a friend of his, who painted a fresco in the adjoining chapel of a fox preaching to a congregation of ducks.

Ahh, but that story is just for the children, said our host, who had by now returned with complimentary shots of schnapps for Alain, myself, and Celia, who wasn’t really interested in the conversation but happy to reap the reward of sitting next to someone as cool as myself. He unfolded the newspaper clipping, which described a recent art exhibition in Strasbourg.

That same fresco was described therin, but the origin story was considerably different. According to it, in the Middle Ages, Geiler de Kaysersberg* (a traveling, preaching superstar of the age) used to deliver sermons in this very chapel/restaurant, which, at the time, was attached to a convent. Geiler evidently possessed sharp, animalistic features that earned him the nickname "the fox": thus, the preaching fox.

* Geiler will return to these pages, once I start posting the good stuff from my city-tour. Yeah – a promise to talk more about a Medieval priest – that’s my idea of a teaser.