28 oct

Drove back to Holland today. Had the plan to go and visit Fontevraud abbey on the way. The largest abbey of Europe, it advertises itself, but I mainly wanted to see the tombs of Henry II, his interesting wife Eleanor and their son Richard Lionheart.
On a small map of Romanesq France I had seen that it was right under Tours, the town that I had to pass. When I was 30 km from Tours I went to have a closer look and found out that Fontevraud in reality was about 40 km West, out of my way. Couldn’t believe that I didn’t figure that out before, but changed plans and went to visit Tours instead.
It is the town of St Martin, a respectable saint by himself, also pretty popular with his statue on a horse while clipping a piece of cloth in two to share it with some poor person. Why not give the whole thing, wrote the dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff, and from reading that I think the sharing was a little cheap, but he is considered highly in the church and in France and visiting his relics was a popular thing to do on the way to Santiago.
Driving into Tours was not a pleasure. The town is called ‘Towers’, but they might as well call it ‘Ugly Concrete Apartment Blocks’ because the city has an enormous amount of them and tries to make you see every single one while guiding you to the center of town.
It is a funny name anyway I thought, ‘Towers’. It surely must have had a name before all these towers made the place remarkable enough to call it after them. I sarted to think of similar odd named cities. In Belgium you have Brugge (Brugues), which means bridges. In Holland there even is a town (maybe a village) that is called Huizen (Houses) which is really the most random name to think of to call a town.
After seeing everything that’s ugly about Tours, I thought, I arrived in the centre of town. Which was buzzing, quite unexpected for a monday end of morning at the end of october I would say. The traffic was slow, there was no clear guidance to a parking place, the one I followed turned out to be a parking garage that was only available for public on saturdays. I never read the small print in instructions and indeed it had said this all the way in tiny letters under a large and welcoming P.
After that I thought Tours was not the town for me and started heading out again. But then, to my surprise, I came in the old part of town, just where I had to be to visit the Basilique St Martin.
Well, that was another disappointment. Martin died around 400, from that period only the Pantheon in Rome still exists, I think. There were some towers from an older Romanesq church left, but the Basilique itself was in a fake neo neo style that is ok, maybe, in itself, but not when you have been treated with the real thing in such ample supplies in the past weeks.
But this church was not even ok, I came to find out. It resembled a big wedding cake. There is nothing wrong with a wedding cake. It is perfect for the occasion, but it is there ultimately to consume and disappear and leaves oneself with a sweet aftertaste which is only bearable to a certain level.
I was pretty much disgusted by the whole experience. Luckily I had a couple of the best Pains au Chocolat that I tasted in the past month, but I could not recommend visiting Tours for just those.
Avoid the city. Avoid the whole area in fact. There are plenty of castles in the immediate surroundings, planted there by all those abusive and exploitive kings and other nobility that made the destructive French Revolution perfectly reasonable.
Dutch people do not have much up with castles, I came to realize. Amazingly enough, for a country that had the first revolution to create a republic, it is a kingdom again. But then with a king so humble that he lives in a sort of remodelled farmhouse. The only real castle in Holland belonged to a guy who married the daughter of the King of England and became King of England himself. That castle is an oddity though.
No, I rather visit a church than a castle. But then not the kind of church that they built in Tours for St Martin in the 19th century. No, after this week in Holland I’ll fly back to Barcelona on saturday, meet up with Julie (and Claire) and continue our search for the real thing with exploring Romanesq Catalunya. Can’t wait.