Why Burgundy?
Although I’ve already crisscrossed France from end to end, only now did I finally visit the region of Burgundy (Bourgogne). The region stretches southeast of the capital, Paris. It’s hilly, green, forested, rich in rivers and lakes… characterized by soft, rolling hills and mostly rural, agricultural landscapes.
And there’s wine. Lots of wine. A whole lot. The region exports some of the best wines in the world, at prices that will take your breath away (the most expensive wine in the world in 2018 was a bottle of Romanée-Conti Grand Cru, which sold for 109,000 euros. Yes, that’s not a typo: one hundred and nine thousand euros for a single bottle).
Dijon, Beaune, Mâcon, Auxerre, Cluny: these are all famous names of large and small towns in a region that technically no longer exists, at least not under this name (more on that below). But who has heard of Chatillon-sur-Chalaronne (pictured)?
Or about the Bazoches château? Or the Buddhist temple in Boulaye? That last sentence, of course, is aimed at most of us, the average traveler, not at an expert in the culture of France, or a tour guide who grew up in the Hexagon (for those who are wondering, that’s the nickname the French use for their country, based on its geometric shape).
A Bit of Background on the Burgundy Region
So why does the region no longer exist? In January 2015, a redrawing of France’s administrative regions took effect, reducing their total number from 22 to 13. Burgundy was merged with the more eastern region bordering Switzerland, Franche-Comté, into a new region (known by the short name BFC) with two capitals. In one, Dijon, sits the police headquarters and the top of the law enforcement hierarchy, the Prefecture, while in the other, Besançon, sit the region’s almost autonomous governing institutions.
The merged region covers about 48,000 km² (a little less, in fact) and has around 3 million residents. The unified region includes a number of large and mid-sized towns and plenty of villages of every size, large, medium, small, and tiny. Alongside all these there are also places for which even the term “tiny hamlet” is too grand. We’re talking about a little “estate” of three farmhouses that counts as an independent entity, even though it’s attached to another town and has no budget of its own. But it still has a “mayor,” a church, and usually a wine estate too. Because Burgundy isn’t Burgundy without wine.
You could write stacks of books and guides about Burgundy. I have no such ambition. Plenty of people far more qualified than me have already done it many times over. I won’t take you to Dijon (the mustard city), France’s 17th largest city (155,000 residents), nor to Beaune, famous for its historic hospital (Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune), where every year a traditional wine auction draws a large professional crowd from around the world.
I want to tell you about a few small experiences, in some other beautiful places.
Guédelon: The Château Rebuilt Using Medieval Methods
Michel Guyot, a French businessman in entertainment and media, is a château and palace enthusiast. He invests much of his fortune in buying ruined châteaux, in whole or in part, restoring them and bringing them back to life. He opens most of them to the public for visits and cultural events, with the proceeds going toward buying and restoring more châteaux.
Château de Saint-Fargeau, a château at the northwestern edge of the Burgundy region (Yonne department), was originally built as a hunting lodge for the Archbishop of Auxerre. Over the years it was expanded, became a large château, and passed through various hands and families through sales, marriages, and other twists of fate. In 1979, two brothers, Michel and Jacques Guyot, bought it to restore it and bring it back to cultural life.
Michel “fell in love” with the beautiful red-brick château and decided to make it his home. Restoring the château required uncovering and understanding its origins and its older architectural layers. A team of scientists and researchers working on this, including a medieval château specialist, produced an in-depth study for the owners that revealed a surprising fact: the current château was built on the foundations of an even older château, dating to 980, whose existence had been unknown.
The lengthy study ends with the sentence: “It would be fascinating to rebuild the buried château of Saint-Fargeau.” Michel, the château enthusiast, needed no more encouragement than that. In 1995 he founded an association to build an old-new château. A group of “people obsessed with the idea” gathered around him: one an expert in brick construction, another in walls, ancient architecture, history, and other trades that existed in the 13th century. Their shared guiding principle: to build a château using the tools and methods of the period. Volunteers and donations have been collected (and still are) from all over France, and even from beyond it. And so, for more than 20 years now, in the Treigny forest, a project has been underway to build a château “just like in the old days.”
The project initially made quite a few people raise an eyebrow in puzzlement, then sparked a lot of curiosity, and today it draws crowds. The stream of visitors never stops, the number of volunteers grows every season (construction work almost completely halts in winter), and countless books, articles, and documentaries have been made about the project. Since I religiously watch French television programs, the Guédelon château stars in almost every travel show I watch about France. This time, the plan became reality, and the Burgundy itinerary was routed through Guédelon.
We, people of the 21st century, are used to building office towers or high-rise apartment buildings. Cranes spin in every direction, lifting and lowering containers and sacks weighing tons, heavy trucks haul dirt and rocks, or alternatively, prefabricated walls, tiles, and porcelain fixtures. Dozens of workers in yellow hard hats rush around like busy ants, pouring concrete and laying steel mesh.
I arrived at a large forest clearing where several volunteer workers were moving about, dressed in jeans or colorful cloth pants and simple cloth overalls. At the end of the path stood a partial, round structure, built entirely of reddish bricks interlaced with strips of mortar made of clay and straw. Openings in the walls were framed with rough wooden beams, some with heavy wooden doors already installed, others still gaping, waiting for a door.
On scaffolding made of wooden planks resting on wooden posts reinforced with ropes of plant fiber and woven branches sat two workers, their heads wrapped in rolled cloth, holding rough iron hammers, carving large stones and laying them one on top of the other, checking the fit and refining angles and corners with a blow of the hammer.
A walk along the wider paths brought me to simple straw huts scattered around the site, surrounding the château that is gradually taking shape. In one of the huts sat an older couple, surrounded by a selection of tools. This was the workshop for building and repairing tools. A saw with a broken wooden handle, a hammer whose handle had come loose, an axe with a worn blade, and more.
Methodically, the couple picked up one tool after another and fitted it with spare parts from among all the objects scattered on the dusty sand floor. In another hut, a woman with wild, dusty hair worked at twisting twigs and flexible branches into a thick rope, which was wound around a short wooden post to tighten the cable holding in place a staircase, made of wood, of course, leading up to the round watchtower rising above the still-incomplete wall.
I wandered slowly among the various huts, and the legend came to life before my eyes. People who set themselves a goal, building an ancient château out of nothing, using period tools. I didn’t see a single drill, not an electric saw, not a cement mixer anywhere. Is this really how they built things back then? Is this how the marvelous Notre-Dame Cathedral rose into the sky? Or the magnificent châteaux of the Loire Valley? We’ll never know for certain, but maybe we get some idea, even if only partial, of what people are capable of.
For more information about the château and visiting, click this link
Château de Bazoches
Bazoches is a small French village, located in a remote spot on the western hills of the regional nature park of Morvan, in the western part of Burgundy (today, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, see above).
According to the 2015 census, 172 people lived in the village. The village was founded, most likely, in the 12th century, and its name derives from the Latin word basilica, which was distorted over the years. Typical French villages formed when farmhouses and homes were built along a road, on both sides. Over time a church was built there, joined later by a café-restaurant, sometimes a post office branch and maybe a small grocery store too. As the village grew, residents also built a town hall. Travelers passing through on the road cross the village, every village, along its whole length between two rows of houses… and the village “ends” in the blink of an eye.
The village of Bazoches is a bit unusual. The main road was apparently rerouted to pass outside the village. All the houses are on one side only, with small internal roads leading to the church, the café, and the town hall, which houses a public library open every Thursday. Around the town hall are a cluster of farms and agricultural operations, one of which even rents out a room for the night, what’s known as “agritourism.” On the other side of the “main” road are pastures and farmland surrounded by wooden fences and green hedges.
A quick internet search for “Bazoches” will bring up around 1,800,000 results, but only a tiny fraction of them refer to this village. The vast majority of the results are about a large, beautiful château located about 2 km from the village’s town hall. The château was built in the 12th century, on the site of an ancient Roman watch station, by the knight Jean de Bazoches (1245-1314), while in the service of the King of France.
The château was passed down through generations of the local de Bazoches family for many years, and when their fortunes declined, it was bought by other nobles. It gained worldwide fame when it was purchased in 1675 by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), the greatest military architect of Louis XIV. As a military architect, Vauban invented fortification methods and built dozens of fortresses and watch stations all along France’s borders. Many of his fortifications are well preserved to this day and serve as remarkable examples of defensive fortified construction, paired with theories of warfare and defense that were studied for many years at military academies around the world.
At Château de Bazoches, the great engineer invested much of his money and talent to build private quarters for his family (he himself stayed at the château very rarely, given his constant travels across the country). In a small wing of the château, Vauban housed talented engineers and assistants he had chosen, to draft and prepare plans for building defensive structures in various locations. In this way the château also served as a research and development lab, as it would be called today, for matters of military defense.
The château’s current owner, a woman of the Sigalas family, is a direct descendant of Vauban’s eldest daughter, Charlotte de Vauban. The family preserves many objects and rooms from the engineer’s era in various wings of the château that are open to visitors. The château sits on a hill overlooking the forested hills of Morvan as far as the eye can see. The château has the shape of an irregular trapezoid, with a round tower at each corner. Above the château’s central courtyard rises a square watchtower (donjon) that overlooks the entire area.
Anyone who has visited France has probably, at some point, visited the Palace of Versailles. You may also have visited one or more of the great and important châteaux of the Loire Valley. With Château de Bazoches, as with many other châteaux in France, you can see another dimension of royal châteaux. Versailles, Chambord, and Chenonceau are magnificent, expensive, royal châteaux, but cold. The gold, the statues, the paintings, and everything else are protected behind ropes or glass walls, with guards watching every move. Visitors gaze in awe at all the wealth and splendor, but a cool, distant atmosphere hangs over all of us. This isn’t ours, the ordinary citizens’; this isn’t us.
When I walk through the endless corridors of Versailles (or Chambord…), it’s hard for me to picture in my mind’s eye a relaxed lady of the house on the sofa, coffee cup in hand, three kids running around in the hallway (“Mom, he kicked me!”). It’s very easy to imagine a stiff knight standing with a raised spear in front of the door, a royal minister bearing a seal sitting in a gilded armchair with ambassadors from around the world around him, or an upright king at a heavy table with a submissive, obedient secretary beside him waiting for his word…
Château de Bazoches is more “human.” True, the furniture is period, but the green velvet upholstered chair looks “normal.” It’s not too big, not too ornate, not too grand. It even looks, maybe, inviting to sit on. In the dining room, on the table, a set of porcelain dishes reminiscent of similar dishes from my grandmother’s house. On the wall, an ordinary oil painting, simple looking, of a hillside landscape with a flock of sheep, instead of a giant painting of knights and a king on their horses, accompanied by soldiers and hunting dogs, trumpets and hunting horns, and maybe even little cherubs flying in the corners of the painting…
The corridor is paved with simple tiles (“flagstones,” that’s how plain they are), of ordinary size and… so human. The château isn’t oppressive, cumbersome, royal, or heavy. Even the château’s rooms are small and intimate, very different from the vast halls of Versailles. I feel comfortable wandering around here, warm among the colorful velvet furniture, among the bookshelves with a small, plain wooden table in between for reading. Suddenly I discovered a new side of the heavy, dignified, royal medieval world. People, yes, the Middle Ages also means people like you and me, had ordinary lives. There’s a copper pot in the kitchen, a book on the table, a coat hanging in the closet.
I went back to the main entrance. A simple staircase leads down to the gravel courtyard in front of the château. Round, oval, and triangular green lawn medallions shape a simple garden decorated with rows of flowers and green shrubs. A house. A path. A courtyard. A new dimension to everyday life.
For more information about the château and to buy tickets, please click this link.
La Boulaye: Dashang Kagyu Ling
La Boulaye… a town hall, a church, a post office, a café-restaurant, about 100 residents… about as average and small as French villages get. I won’t dwell on it, because it’s really not that interesting. There are dozens like it all over the country, and if not for one small event, a comma in history, we would never have heard of it. In 1974, Didier Garanger (better known by the nickname Didier de Plaige) arrived here with his wife to establish the “Temple of the 1,000 Buddhas.” How did this adventure come about?
Didier, a Parisian born in 1948, a yoga teacher, is a free-radio enthusiast who had been drawn all his life to Eastern cultures. In 1969 he traveled to Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland to study Buddhism in depth. Following his studies, he returned to France in 1971 and in 1973 founded a Buddhist meditation center. The place served as a refuge for Buddhist monks who had fled Tibet, which had been occupied at the time by Communist China. The site was renamed Paldenshangpa La Boulaye and is branded as a Buddhist study and meditation center.
The Buddhist monastery at the site was inaugurated in 1987 and is considered the first, and largest, Himalayan Buddhist monastery in Europe. The monastery was built based on the model of the original monastery in Tibet, Samye Monastery. Three stories tall, multicolored, in Bhutanese style, the monastery contains thousands of figurines and Buddha statues in various sizes and poses. Not the whole building is open to visitors. The main hall is reserved for study and prayer, and “ordinary people” aren’t allowed in during the day. A stupa (a round, pointed structure typical of Buddhist temples) rises large in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded by a variety of figurines, baskets, low stone walls, and other typical features of Buddhist temples.
I’m no expert on Buddhism, but I have been to East Asia. I traveled a bit in India, Thailand, and Cambodia, and saw a few symbols of the Buddhist faith. At this temple in France, at least at this time of year, the atmosphere is completely different.
There’s no smell of incense, and the murmur of prayers is replaced by complete silence in the gray light of late winter. The sky is dark, the clouds are low and heavy, and rain is on its way. There isn’t a soul in the deserted courtyard, and everything looks abandoned. A lone maintenance man, dressed in a green robe, holding a red broom, slowly sweeps the paved path in front of the colorful building. As I climbed the open stairs to the second floor, I noticed several small sitting mats, laid out in perfect order on the floor of the upper hall, empty, solitary, and abandoned. The riot of colors from the statues around me stood in complete contrast to the gloomy mood, to the gray April weather of France. I’m the only one in the long, colorful corridor and I can’t shake the feeling of being a “trespasser,” of “intruding on a place that isn’t mine,” even though there’s no one here.
The center at La Boulaye has become, over the years, a European hub of Buddhism, and thousands of believers come here for prayer, fasting, and retreat. And yet, there’s no one in the corridors, the passageways are deserted, and the courtyards are empty. Is it because of the winter weather? Is there a “season” for religious and spiritual devotion, like a “vacation season,” an “exam season,” or a “festival season”? Is this simply the nature of retreat and fasting? Is this the fate of a Buddhist monk?
For a full hour I wandered among statues and colorful decorations, between an altar and statues of Buddha sitting or lying down… and no one stopped me, no one met my eyes, no one asked me anything. I felt alone in the complex. Is that the point of Buddhism? To feel alone, apart? In the parking lot covered in white gravel, my car was parked among several other cars (where were their owners? A monk with a driver’s license? An accountant who came to work for the day at the monastery office? A kitchen worker who came to make hot soup?), and as I sat down in the driver’s seat, a young man in jeans, a tool bag in hand, crossed the lot with the crunch of gravel under his feet. A monk who snuck out of prayer? A plumber who finished fixing a faucet? Or maybe a technician who just finished repairing a television… no, there’s probably no television at the monastery.
Ordinary, everyday people pass by, visible to all. The religious people disappear, hidden, only protecting us with their secret prayers. I left the largest Buddhist monastery in Europe without seeing a single monk, a single clergyman, a single holy figure. As far as I was concerned, it could just as well have been the local community center on a day off, or the neighborhood tennis court on a stormy winter day. Not a living soul. Only God lingers over the place.
Further reading: Tanlay Château, a Renaissance château surrounded by water in northern Burgundy, with a gallery entirely covered in trompe-l’œil paintings and a frescoed ceiling from the era of the Wars of Religion.
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