On my travels abroad I have managed to accumulate a variety of interesting curiosities
which are outlined as follows :
which are outlined as follows :
Breton
legends
St Thegonnec
Few regions of France are as pious as Brittany and thousands
of saints are venerated in the churches and parish closes. Many of them are undoubtedly apocryphal but
there is a strong legend that St Thegonnec tamed a wolf after it had eaten his
donkey and used it to draw his cart.
This is depicted on the very fine calvary at St Thegonnec.
Meanwhile at nearby Guimiliau the elaborate
carvings on the church calvary include the horrific scenes of a young girl
being torn apart by demons. Catell
Gollet loved dancing and other supposedly sinful activities. She took a handsome lover and discovered all
too late that he was the devil in disguise.
Her final damnation was to steal consecrated wafers for her lover. Her
dreadful punishment is publicized on the calvary as a warning to all 'bad
girls’.
Ankou is the Breton incarnation of death. This skeletal figure of the ‘grim reaper’ is
depicted throughout the region. He
drives a creaking cart piled high with bodies, he spares nobody. On the side of the 17th century
ossuary at La Roche-Maurice Ankou is
depicticted above a holy water stoup. The inscription reads ‘I’ll kill you
all’. Of course, Ankou spares nobody.
Salaun
There is a very strong legend at le Folgoet where
the village and its church are a place of pilgrimage. The name Folgoet or Fool’s Wood, recalls the
miraculous legend of Salaun who, in the 14th century, lived in a
wood near a spring on which the church now stands. The boy was a poor half-wit and could only
speak a few words – the Breton for ‘Hail, Lady Virgin Mary’, which he
constantly repeated to himself. When he
died in 1358, a white lily grew on his grave bearing the words ‘Ave Maria’ in
gold letters. Duke Jean 1V built a
chapel over Salaun’s spring, which subsequently grew into the fine basilica we
see today. Salaun’s holy well situated
on the east side of the church, springs from under the altar.
Yves Helori
Yves Helori (1253-1303) now venerated as St Ives
and buried in Treguir cathedral was indeed a real person. He was a lawyer and is the patron saint of
lawyers. He was a champion of the poor
and as a magistrate Yves was famously incorruptible. The image of him standing between a
well-dressed man and a man in rags recalls a story when a rich man sued a
beggar for loitering by his kitchen door and ‘stealing’ his cooking
smells. On this occasion, Ives declared
for the rich man and awarded him appropriate damages – the sound of a coin
rattling in a tin.
St Yves
A shrine to St Guirec
The Bay
of St Guirec is situated
on Brittany ’s
‘Pink Granite Coast'
near to Ploumanach. A little stone
shrine on the beach is dedicated to St Guirec who landed there on the sixth
century. There is a granite statue of
St Guirec inside the shrine. Originally
the statue was of wood, but it suffered greatly because of the old tradition by
which girls wanting to find a husband, stuck a pin into its nose, and it had to
be replaced.
St Cado
The
tiny village of St Cado is on a circular islet on the
Etel estuary on Brittany ’s
Atlantic coast, an idyllic place connected to the mainland by a substantial stone
bridge.
The
Romanesque church is dedicated to the island’s patron saint, St Cado. This Celtic monk is said to have been able to
cure deafness in all who placed their ears against his stone bed which is to be
found inside the church.
Legend
has it that St Cado persuaded the Devil to build the bridge to link the island
to the mainland in return for the first soul to travel across. It is said that St Cado sent a cat across the
bridge before anyone used it.
St Cado
The chapel
of St Barbe
The tiny white 17th century chapel of
St Barbe stands on a small hump of cliff at the eastern end of the harbour at
Roscoff on the north coast of Brittany . Apparently St Barbe was entrusted with the
task of protecting Roscoff from Pirates and enemies of the church. A nearby plaque tells us that it is still
used as a landmark for sailors and was built as a expression of devotion to beg
St Barbe for protection against the dangers of the coast.
Roscoff is the port
where ‘Onion Johnnies’ left for England
with their bikes and bunches of onions to sell.
We are told that the ‘Johnnies’ never failed to salute the saint by
hoisting their flag three times.
Our Lady in
the Marshes
A
unique statue is to be found in the church
of St Sulpice at Fougères
in Normandy .
In
the 11th century the Chapel of St Mary was built within the castle
walls at Fougères but the castle was destroyed in the 12th
century. In the 13th century
the Lusignan family rebuilt the mighty castle and at the same time, the nearby
parish of St Sulpice decided to extend their church. Whilst digging the foundations, the people
found a statue which they called Our Lady in the Marshes in reference to the
marshy area.
Thirty
inches high, the statue is made of Caen
stone with the Virgin Mary in a sitting position holding the baby Jesus, who is
suckling his mother’s breast.
Throughout the centuries devotion to this statue has not weakened and in
1923 Pope Pius X1 honoured the Virgin of the Marshes with a solemn coronation.
Little Flower of Jesus
Building
of the huge hilltop basilica at Lisieux, visited by some 100,000 pilgrims each
year, commenced as late as 1926, a year after the canonisation of its patron St
Thérèse of the Child Jesus, and was completed in 1954 as her shrine.
Known
as ‘The Little Flower of Jesus’, Marie-Francoise-Thérèse Martin, the youngest
of nine children, was born in 1873 into a very pious family. She was a frail child and at the age of nine she nearly died, but a
vision of Our Lady smiling at her, effected an immediate and complete
cure. At the age of 13 years,
Thérèse and her father began a campaign for
her to enter a convent before the normal age of 16 years and she was
subsequently admitted to the Carmel convent as Thérèse de l’enfant Jesus in 1888
when she was fifteen. She was ordered by
the Mother Superior to try her hand at writing which resulted in her
autobiography, ‘The story of a Soul’, the most famous passage being fusion with
Jesus in the form of a wedding invitation.
Racked by consumption, the ‘little flower’ died in 1898, at the age of
just twenty five. Following her
canonisation she was made a doctor of the Church in 1997
The Black Madonna
The annual Pardon at Guincamp in Brittany brings pilgrims to pay homage to the much venerated Black Madonna in the Basilica of Notre Dame de Bon Secours. There are several such icons in France of medieval origin but the exact origin is not easy to determine.
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