Thizy is a very small village located near the small town of Montréal in Burgundy. It has a château and a village church, and it has a big maison de retraite (retirement home) across the road from the château, which dates back to the 13th and 14th centuries. We made a stop at Thizy last October.
According to its Wikipedia page, the Château de Thizy is still lived in. In fact, it's been divided up into apartments and serves as a kind of condominium complex (une copropriété). The population of the village of Thizy is about 165. I wonder how many live in the château.
We just drove up into Thizy out of curiosity after the long walk we had taken with the dog in nearby Montréal. The château is of course not open to the public, since people live in it, and the village church was locked up tight.
Every French village and town has a memorial to the soldiers who died in the Great War of 1914-18. Ceremonies around the world are being held these days to mark the 100th anniversary of that war. In fact, I got a request from a group in the state of Washington in the U.S. to use one of my photos of the town of Saint-Aignan, because a veteran from the town there was stationed here during WWI.
I enjoyed looking at the old stone carvings on the château's grounds, outside the main gate. I wonder if the one on the left is a gargoyle that has been taken down off the church or the château. It was on the ground
You might call the statue on the right "the green goddess." Of course it's a madonna and child. It was set in a niche in the wall of the château's fortifications.
There was a lot of activity at the retirement home across the street in Thizy, with a good amount of car traffic while we were there. Maybe the employees were getting off work at that hour, or a shift was changing.
Does the US still have a few WWI vets living? All the French, Australian and British ones have now died I think. Love the statuary.
ReplyDeleteIt appears that the last U.S. veteran of WWI, a man named Frank Buckles, passed away in 2011 at age 110.
DeleteHave you ever read off the names from those memorials? Have you noticed how the same family name might be on that stele, for a tiny village, 6, 7 or even more times? We were in Valensole last summer and bought some lavendar essential oil from the Angelvin distillery. Apparently the family wasn't wiped out, but they lost so many brothers and cousins in WWI. It makes you wonder. Some villages are so, so tiny and yet they lost whole families.
ReplyDeleteI have noticed that on the war monuments here in the Loire Valley. The same family names appear many times, so as you say brothers and cousins. A generation wiped out.
DeleteIt's interesting about the guy from Washington State using your photo and asking permission to do so. You are probably helping French students that you don't know research papers and such.
DeleteThose Great War monuments always make me glad that my father got to France when the war was over- otherwise I might not be here today....
I always stop to look at those memorials, especially in a small town, and think that France has a good reason to be so cautious about involving itself in other wars.
ReplyDeleteEvelyn, that's how I ran across Ken's blog to begin with! I was googling around for images of stained-glass windows in Chartres (I think?) and used one or two of Ken's in my classroom presentation Power Point -- and I didn't even notice whose blog I was reading. The next year, I was googling again, and found the same photos, and finally noticed the name... I hadn't talked to Ken since 1982, so I was so excited to come across his blog :) I realize that I did the same thing with Walt's photos from a post about la fête des rois :)
ReplyDeleteOur virtual world is large and at the same time small and familiar.
Deletethe same thing with war monuments in the Languedoc -- same name after same name, all "mort pour La France." The French have good reason not to want more wars on their turf, and very good reasons to support the EU.
ReplyDelete