Monday, January 18, 2021

Fontevraud abbey

Here's a flashback to the fall of 2003, shortly after we moved to France. A friend was visiting and we spent a lot of time tooling around our region exploring châteaux and churches and villages. And cafés and restaurants. I posted a smaller, more severely cropped, version of this photo back in 2010.

Inside the Fontevraud abbey, September 2003.

I don't know what it is, but it's inside the abbey church at Fontevraud, not far from Chinon. I liked how the candles mimicked the columns on the sculpted stone. If I remember correctly, we had our dog, Collette, with us. Ken stayed outside the abbey walking the dog around and sipping wine in a café while our friend C. and I went inside for a look. We had visited this place once before, so he wasn't missing out.

9 comments:

  1. What a fascinating structure and ornamentation. I wonder what it was built as.

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  2. I just remembered, Fontevraud Abbey is where Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitane are entombed... Jerry's great-grandparents (25x).

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    1. I am a nut for the Plantagenet history surrounding Eleanor of Aquitaine (I do a big unit in French 3), and I don't remember knowing this about SG!

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    2. Judy:
      His ancestry is fascinating and all verifiable. There's a researcher using SG's DNA to try to trace the origin of a specific heraldic family. We've got books on Plantagenet Ancestry and Magna Carta Ancestry on the shelf. I, on the other hand, can go back to a 5-greats grandfather in Poland whose occupation was listed as BEGGAR! He has a website: connectedbloodlines.com

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  3. Maybe it was intended to be a tomb? The plain bit below the columns would be where the dedication would be carved.

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  4. Your clock widget is most impressive. I thought at first it was a countdown, and that you are going to get to midday of the 20th before those of us over here. :-)
    That abbey whatever is intriguing -- the broken pediment, so common on English furniture, and all the Greek styling. I'd guess some kind of tomb, or altar.

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  5. mitch, Cool! Have you and/or Jerry been to the abbey?

    judy, do you show "The Lion in Winter?"

    chris, I think that's a good guess.

    emm, I was thinking the same. About the stone work, not the widget. LOL

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    1. Not yet. We'd love to do a historic dead grandparents tour as a way of seeing these fascinating places in Europe.

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