‘Pierre aux Dames’, ‘slab cemetery’ of Geneva’s Museum of Art and History, 30 May
These feminine shapes are alleged to have been carved in the Geneva area in the Roman period; however, I shall not answer the questions of loci argumentorum (i.e. classical rhetoric): quis, quid, quando, ubi, cur, quem ad modum, quibus adminiculis [who, what, when, where, why, in what way, by what means].
Suffice is to say that after my disappointment at how the museum’s Prehistoric, Celtic and Gallo-Roman collections are presented (I had not visited this room for years; the collections have since moved from the ground floor to the basement and there are now fewer items on display compared with my teenage years from what I can recollect) I was delighted at my coming across by chance of this erratic stone unearthed in the canton of Geneva in 1819 which I immediately recognised as the ‘Stone with Ladies’ (‘Pierre aux Dames’) – unfortunately, this item (which was part of a megalithic structure some 4,000 years ago) is not even considered worthy to merit a placard and is used as a kind of gardening rack in the courtyard of Geneva’s Museum of Art and History.
To me, the ‘Stone with Ladies’ was a belated ‘answer’ to my visit to Laténium to see a prehistoric artefact in April of this year (‘In search of the prehistoric feminine’). This is because I have always found this period of my country’s history to be simply fascinating:
I am the proud owner of this book. 😉
Portrait of Caius Octavius (Augustus), Museum of Art and History, Geneva, 30 May
That is not to say that I no longer respond to the beauty of Roman sculpture. On the contrary, I find this portrait of Caius Octavius (the real name of the emperor Augustus) in his younger years (he was born in 63 BC) as fascinating: somehow the sculptor managed to convey the psychological scars Rome’s first emperor was left with in his latter years as a result of the loss of three legions (roughly 10% of Rome’s fighting forces) in the Teutoburg forest in Germany in 9 AD.
Totemic representation of a Celtic warrior found at Geneva harbour in 1898.
Yet I fully respond to the suggestiveness of Celtic statuary, too; the Celtic civilisation was a subtle* civilisation – far more than we are willing to acknowledge, even today.
* OED: Old French sutil, so(u)til from Latin subtilis, which I believe is derived from the Latin words sub andtelum (behind/under and spear), two words which together I reckon mean ‘at the core’, ‘in essence’ (i.e., literally ‘beneath the shine’ astelum also means sunshine as well as lightning).
PS To me, the claim that the annihilation of these three legions ultimately brought about two worlds that would clash again and again throughout history (the Germanic versus the Latin/Romance/Gallic worlds) because Rome after the Teutoburg disaster had to scrap its former ambition to incorporate Germany into the Roman empire is simply historical speculation gone amok.
multa hominum milia caesa, multa sub corona venundata. cumque dirutis omnibus Aventicum gentis caput infesto agmine peteretur, missi qui dederent civitatem, et deditio accepta.
Thousands were put to the sword, thousands more were sold into slavery. Every place having been completely destroyed, the army was marching in regular order on Aventicum, the capital town, when a deputation was sent to surrender the city. This surrender was accepted.
Tacitus, Hist. 1.67-69 (tr. by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb [1864-1877])
Although I remember disguising myself as Julius Caesar for Fête de l’Escalade in school when I was eleven and although I took several seminars (and exams) on archaeological subjects related to the Roman empire when I studied Ancient History as a minor subject at the University of Geneva more than a decade later, Roman civilisation somehow seems to have lost most of the shine it used to exert on me.
Of course, I cannot deny that the Romans have had an enormous impact on us here in the West, but I also feel that the less positive or simply downright negative aspects of this people are not really being acknowledged (for instance, the Roman’s extreme ruthlessness and brutality towards the peoples who tried to resist them – which is why I inserted at the beginning of this entry a quote from the Roman historian Tacitus about an uprising against the Romans that took place in Switzerland in 68-69 AD). In addition, the cultural/‘civilisational’ achievements of the people conquered and ultimately assimilated into the Roman empire tend to be downplayed still to this day, some 2,000 years later.
Based on the programme of Aventicum MMXV, I felt that the commemorations were no exception to this general tendency given that I saw that there would be absolutely nothing devoted to the Helvetii and also very little to their immediate descendants who were quickly assimilated into the Roman empire – they are generally called the Gallo-Romans.
Several historians have been advocating that we adopt a different view of the Celts (i.e. that we judge them based on their achievements, not based on what Roman historians thought of them) for close to thirty years now, but this more favourable attitude towards the Celts seems to have not made it into generally accepted beliefs about our ancestors of 2,000 years ago:
For my part, the people(s) who really interest me are those that built structures like the one below, the Celts’ own far-distant ancestors. 😉
[Dolmen, Bugibba Temple, Malta, 3000 to 2000 BC, 3 March 2011]
So much so that I would love to go to this place in Scotland this summer:
Screenshot of the website (no longer online) for the film Eine Frau in Berlin, directed by Max Färberböck, starring Nina Hoss, 2008
70 years ago, Nazi Germany surrendered on this day. For some odd reason, on Thursday 30th April I borrowed from Lausanne’s university library a wartime dairy written by a woman (published anonymously) during the battle of Berlin and its immediate aftermath. I also borrowed Antony Beevor’s classic account of the same event. I perused through the pages of Berlin, the downfall 1945 whilst I was walking back home and, once home, I read A woman in Berlin until page 71 (that is, in the French edition) in one go.
However, I could not go any further, i.e. I could not get myself to read her entry for 1st May 1945 and thereafter because of the poignancy of the daydream she has about distancing herself from her body after she has been raped multiple times. Although reminiscent of out-of-body experiences, her daydream might be more closely related to what a French researcher, Dr Judith Trinquart, who has studied prostitutes’ psychological responses to their plight, calls ‘decorporalisation’ — an attempt to protect themselves by dissociating themselves from their bodies but still with negative consequences ultimately.
Somehow I could not escape associating these horrible descriptions of rape committed by soldiers during WWII with a book I had finished just the day before about the meat industry. In both cases, the ruthlessness, the lack of compassion or mercy of the perpetrators (rapists or knockers off) seem to be distinguishing traits. This description of the total lack of pity displayed by the owner of an independent slaughterhouse in the USA also still haunts me:
So I was extremely happy tonight to have been able to eat my first salad from our balcony; it was so delicious that I could not help but eat several leaves before reaching for my camera. I am so happy that my wife has green fingers because this translates into healthy organic vegetables being grown just outside of our kitchen door (and of course, no blood was shed for this meal).
Postscript (a few hours later)
Somehow my mind is only half relieved, even though I managed to write the above post, a little in keeping with Tolstoy’s famous quote linking slaughterhouses with battlefields. My intention was to write a kind of essay, but this takes time and my thoughts still need further clarification. In the meantime, here are some links about this painful event – which some describe as the biggest rape in world history.
‘The rape of Berlin’, Lucy Ash, BBC News, 1 May 2015 [I wonder whether the BBC says anything about the same crimes committed by the Allied forces – see below]
‘Hitler’s Teeth’, Neal Ascherson, The London Review of Books, 28 November 2002
‘They raped every German female from eight to 80’, Antony Beevor, The Guardian, 1 May 2002 [contains Beevor’s famous estimate of the numbers of women who were raped and which is also mentioned in his book, Berlin the downfall 1945]
PS The search engine Yandex (used by duckduckgo.com, ‘The search engine that doesn’t track you.’) is becoming better and better: it has already indexed this post (as I found out a couple of minutes ago when I was looking up the link to Dr Judith Trinquart’s PhD dissertation – the keywords I used were Dr Judith Trinquart decorporalisation). 😉
Renaissance, not Middle Ages…this is because I do not have pictures showing a medieval event, so I had to make use of whatever soldiers in armour I had in my picture archive (Fête del‘Escalade, Geneva, 2011). [Please note that the words in dark red in the text below are hyperlinks.]
As I was doing some fact checking for a post I am writing on Switzerland’s largest museum on prehistory and archaeology (which I visited last week in Neuchâtel), I stumbled across some references to past editions of Swiss Celtic festivals which I had not heard about in due time. Held during weekends in August or September 2007, 2010 and 2012 in the region of the Three Lakes (Neuchâtel, Morat, Bienne), these events seem to have been as much about celebrating the revival of Celtic music in its present form as about recreating some aspects of Celtic life in Switzerland for the modern visitor:
This reminded me of a medieval festival at Estavayer-le-Lac I had missed almost two years ago:
During the process of checking the date of this medieval festival, held (as it should be) at a castle (that of Chenaux, Estavayer-le-Lac), to my surprise I found out that several similar events are organised either each year, every two years or even on a less frequent basis in Switzerland. So I thought it would be nice to share this list on the Internet so that anybody interested in such recreations of medieval history staged in Switzerland might have some kind of starting point from which to go further, especially since 2015 looks to be a vintage year for Swiss medieval festivals.
The first event on this year’s calendar is to be held at Avenches, the town which was the capital of the equivalent of Switzerland under the Romans. To mark its 2000th anniversary as a town/city, Avenches will be holding on 22 to 25 May 2015 probably the second largest gathering of reenacting associations in Switzerland this year and its medieval village is likely to stand out in this respect with no fewer than 250 participants in historical costumes — more information at http://www.aventicum2015.ch/ (in French).
On 20 and 21 June 2015, to celebrate St. John’s day (midsummer’s day) the Castle of Gruyères will be holding a ‘medieval’ fair presenting to the visitor some of the craftsmanship and forms of entertainment of the 16th century in what I consider to be one of Switzerland’s loveliest castles — more information on the web page of the tourism office of Gruyères dedicated to this event. Unofficial clip shot in 2007:
For its 10th edition (to be held on 10, 11 and 12 July 2015), the ‘médiévales’ of Saint-Ursanne in the canton of Jura has chosen the themes of ‘myths and fantasy’. The event, which is normally the largest of its kind in Switzerland (but this year it looks like it will have to vie for the second position with Aventicum MMXV because of Fêtes médiévales de Saillon), will have an Arthurian camp with some 50 participants and visitors will be able to listen to tales and stories from the Middle Ages. According to the web page of ‘lesmédiévales’, this three-day event will feature hundreds of participants, performers and actors as well as it will bring together dozens of craftsmen/craftswomen who will be displaying their skills — additional info on the FB page of ‘les médiévales’ of Saint-Ursanne. Clip by a local TV station (KBleu) with more clips available on the same famous web channel:
On 15 and 16 August 2015, the castle of Grandson (whose garrison was put to death by the forces of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, after they had surrendered on 28 February 1476) will hold its medieval weekend. In addition to providing food, craftsmanship and forms of entertainment typical of the Middle Ages in the castle’s courtyards, gardens and many halls, the festival offers visitors the opportunity to wear medieval costumes so as to be able to ‘soak up the atmosphere’. More info at http://www.chateau-grandson.ch/en/medieval_festival.html; some pictures of previous editions are available at http://www.amis-chateau-grandson.ch/albums-photos. Unofficial clip:
Fêtes Médiévales de Saillon, Switzerland’s oldest medieval festival (the first edition was held in 1987), takes place every four years at Saillon in the French-speaking part of the canton of Valais. Over five days, this festival offers various medieval workshops as well as all the other types of activities you would expect from such a festival: medieval falconry, knight tournaments, performances by jugglers, plays as well as music and dance performances. The highlight of this festival is probably the ‘grand cortège’ (street procession) of some 1,000 participants clad in full medieval attire and the 500 performers/artistes who will put up medieval performances on the closing Sunday. The festival attracts over 25,000 visitors, so be prepared to book your ticket(s) in advance. The programme for this year’s edition, which is to take place from 9 to 13 September 2015, is available here; the theme of Fêtes Médiévales de Saillon 2015 is the Orient, in keeping with 2015 being the year of light (UNESCO) and in recognition of the Orient’s contribution to the European Middle Ages. Official clip:
The medieval festival at the castle of Chenauxin the charming lakeside town of Estavayer-le-Lac, which has managed to preserve much of its medieval character, seems to be one of the latest joiners to the calendar of Swiss medieval festivals as the first edition was organised in 2013. The event will include demonstrations of medieval archery and fencing, combat reenactment, medieval storytelling, a mass in Latin, food tasting (including a medieval feast), medieval music and dances, etc. It will be held on the weekend of 26-27 September 2015. Photos and other information are available at http://www.estavayer1470.ch.
As part of the Christmas market held at Montreux, three ‘medieval magic’ weekends are organised in December at one of the most romantic castles in Switzerland, château de Chillon, with activities such as medieval music and dances, Christmas stories, workshops, etc. More info here.