Lauragais Blog

Anyone for roast pigeon?

24/5/2020

Yesterday, I enjoyed a fascinating encounter with Michel Lucien, the acknowledged expert on pigeonniers or dovecotes. In the 16th century, France had 42,000 of these buildings, constructed in an astonishing range of styles. There are still around 1,700 of them in my department of the Tarn alone.

In the Midi, they had nothing to do with racing pigeons or pigeon fanciers. Their main aim was to produce squabs, or baby pigeons, for the table. A modest pigeonnier with 200 nests could produce 60 a week, making the pigeonnier a reliable and valuable source of fresh meat. The babies spent their short lives (around 28 days) in pigeonholes made of wicker, wood or clay. In addition to their culinary attraction, the pigeons' manure was a highly-prized fertiliser used mainly in the vineyards, and for some owners, this was more important than the meat.

A few days earlier, I had visited Céline Taffarello who owns the Auberge du Poids Public hotel-restaurant in Saint-Félix-Lauragais. Her family has kept roast pigeon on the menu for over 30 years, and it has been eaten in her establishment by President François Mitterrand and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. No one quite remembers what Tony Blair ate when he booked a table, and I suspect that supermodel Margaux Hemingway ordered something lighter.

Visit Michel Lucien’s website for more, much better photos than mine..
Or follow my example and buy one of his wonderfully illustrated books.

michel lucien

pigeonniers

France in lockdown: time for virtual visits and armchair tourism

18/3/2020

If, like me, you are not allowed to leave your home without good reason, all is not lost. Why not escape on a virtual visit to the Lauragais through the pages of a book? This part of France is blessed with an extraordinarily rich history and, except for the next 14 days, a vibrant present. When you reach Part IV - A Hundred Years of Misery, you may conclude that the current situation is not so bad, at least not from a historical perspective. Here is an extract from Chapter 18 of my book, Lauragais: Steeped in History, Soaked in Blood.

Chapter 18 - The Black Prince

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Europe’s weather took a dramatic turn for the worse. Summers were unusually cold and wet, and it was often impossible to plough or sow or harvest or make hay. In the Lauragais, one historian estimates that between 1300 and 1346 there were twenty-five years when winter reserves were exhausted before the new crops were ready to harvest. The worst period was the Great Famine of 1315, when somewhere between ten and twenty-five percent of Europe’s population died of starvation.

It was during these times of hunger that the first citizens of Revel set to work and began to build their new town around the seneschal’s stake in the centre of the market square. They chopped down trees in the forest of Vauré and erected their timber-framed houses. From the safety of the new bastide they would be able to face the future with more optimism. The consuls had appointed guards to defend the town, and others to protect the crops in their orchards, vineyards and fields from marauders and wild beasts. One day soon they would find time to profit from Article 22 of the charter by raising ramparts and digging moats which they would stock with fish.

I can picture members of the new bourgeoisie going about their business and meeting friends or neighbours at the market or in the street. Life would improve now, wouldn’t it? And indeed, the inclement weather that had so often ruined their agriculture since the start of the century began to improve. The rain clouds became less prevalent and the temperatures began to climb, and people dared to hope the worst was behind them. But there are Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and famine was not the only one who was circling the Lauragais. Death was always close at hand, and the Hundred Years’ War had rumbled away in the north for ten years and would soon come much nearer, but first came pestilence.

In Europe as a whole, the Black Death is believed to have killed a third of the population. The causes of the plague and its calamitous effects on society have been debated and documented elsewhere, so I shall restrict myself to observing that in Revel and much of the Lauragais, the epidemic reached its peak in the summer of 1348 and gradually died out the following year along with half the population. The plague took no notice of age, profession or position. In the space of a few short months, on average, half the mothers, half the children, half the bakers, half the butchers, half the carpenters, half the stonemasons, half the gravediggers, half the town guards were all dead.

The survivors barely had time to bury all the corpses and adapt to life with one-in-two people missing before another calamity hit the Lauragais. In the Book of Revelations war is represented by a red horse, but in 1355 it manifested itself in the shape of the Black Prince. The length of his visit could be counted in days, but the unforeseen effects of his subsequent actions would afflict the Lauragais for sixty years.

If you would like to read more:

buy LAURAGAIS online

A morning run through 10,000 years of history

5/3/2020

Why do I love the Lauragais and the Montagne Noire? Where else can you find a heritage trail that offers so much in such a short distance, not to mention seeing France’s most beautiful tree naked in the sunshine?

08.15 – It’s spitting with rain but I’m convinced it won’t last. The high wall of a park provides some shelter; it belongs to the Abbey of Sorèze, founded in 754, turned into a Royal Military School under Louis XVI, and now home to the Dom Robert tapestry museum.

08.45 – It’s windy on the limestone plateau above Sorèze. Perhaps I should take shelter in one of the many caves beneath my feet, such as the Grotte de Calel where my archaeology-speleology friends have found evidence of iron ore mining dating from the 11th century (this is a photo I took on another occasion!)

09.23 – I am on top of the world, looking out on the Lauragais and the Pyrenees from the Montalric orientation table (789 metres).

09.36 – It’s a stony, gently-descending path through the forest that takes me past the forge and workshops of Grangevieille. Here, they preserve the ancient arts of metalworking, and this is the place to come if you need some ornate metal banisters for your staircase or a new chandelier for your château.

09.48 – I burst out of the forest into a clearing at Saint-Jammes where I eat a banana inside the ruins of a church founded in 1131. Next to me in this green forest glade stands the majestic beech tree of Saint-Jammes, 450 years old, voted the most beautiful tree in France earlier this year, and currently competing in the European Tree of the Year 2020 competition (the winner will be announced on 17 March).

10.25 – I pause in my downhill dash to take a photo of the rusty remains of a charcoal burner’s kiln.

10.29 – It begins to rain. If I take a path on my left, I can shelter under a natural rock porch which, archaeologists have found, was used for similar purposes by my Neolithic ancestors. Instead, I press on and slither over a section of rock marked with deep grooves made by all the horse drawn carts that have passed this way over the millennia.

10.32 – I pick my way through the excavated ruins of the fortified village of Brunichellis, occupied between the 12th and 13th centuries.

10.33 – On TV this morning, the meteorologists promised rain by ten o’clock. Now I can see it sweeping towards me across the plain of the Lauragais. I up my pace along the earthworks of a fort built by the Gauls before the Romans arrived.

10.45 – It starts to rain, but I am close enough to the finish line not to care, and within minutes I am back in the abbey’s car park.

Can you beat a route like that? Twenty-one kilometres, although you can cut that down to around fourteen if you skip the orientation table.

Preparing to give a talk on the Lauragais

13/2/2020

There is a good reason why the Tuesday Club in Pézenas meets on a Wednesday, but I won’t explain it here!

Thanks for organising the event, Sandra Jones.

From the Caucasus to Castres via the Red Army and the Wehrmacht

27/1/2020

This post tells the extraordinary story of Vakhtang Sekhniachvili, and it follows on from my previous post of 11 January in which I visited the archives in Albi on a quest to identify a pair of dead German soldiers.

During my visit, another document caught my eye. Dated October 1944, it listed the names of ten German soldiers killed and buried within the commune of Castres during the Occupation. What intrigued me were their bizarre names and even stranger places of birth: Georgia, Mongolia, Turkestan, Kyrgyzstan and the Caucasus

What, I wondered, were men like these doing in the German army?

I went in search of answers and soon came across various articles about one of these men: Vakhtang Sekhniachvili. Born in the village of Telavi in Georgia in the Caucasus, he was conscripted into a Soviet armoured regiment in 1941. A year later, his tank was hit while fighting in the Ukraine. He survived but became a prisoner-of-war (POW).

More than three million Soviet POWs are believed to have died in German custody – that’s around half of the total. Their deaths were caused by a combination of starvation, exposure, disease and executions. Vakhtang was among the several hundred thousand who chose to escape the deadly prison camps by joining the Wehrmacht. He was drafted into a unit called the Georgian Legion, and he was sent thousands of kilometres across Europe to Castres.

By 1944, a large proportion of the ‘German’ troops occupying south-west France were ex-POWs like Vakhtang. They were known as Hiwis – an abbreviation of the German word ‘Hilfswilliger’ or auxiliary volunteer. They numbered around 600,000 in total, and the entire garrison of Castres consisted of Soviet POWs, apart from some 70 officers.

In July 1944, Vakhtang was posted north of Albi to guard the coal mines around Carmaux. He was soon in contact with the local Resistance, and during the night of the 3 and 4 August he helped organise the escape of 161 fellow-Georgians who then joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. Two days later the newly-swollen ranks of the Resistance were attacked by the Wehrmacht. Seven Georgians were among the 21 Resistance dead, but Vakhtang escaped unharmed. On 16 August he took part in the liberation of Carmaux, and by the end of the war in May 1945 he was known as Commandant Vania, and he led a group of 300 Georgians who had fought with the Resistance (some of them are shown in the two black-and-white photos).

On 7 July 1945, he was awarded the French Military Cross and offered a post in the 1st Army under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. Understandably, he chose instead to return to his home village of Telavi where he proudly displayed his French medals and was treated as a hero. For a while, even the authorities were impressed: he was promoted by the Communist party and put in charge of propaganda. Then came the Cold War and Stalin’s purges. In 1947, Vakhtang was arrested by the KGB in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, accused of being an imperialist spy, and of collaborating with the British and Americans. Pronounced guilty, his medals were confiscated and he was sent to the gulag. Most of the returning Hiwis met a similar fate or were executed.

This period of forced labour lasted until Stalin’s death in 1953. Vakhtang was one of the first to be liberated, and many more of the surviving Hiwis found freedom under a general amnesty granted by Nikita Khrushchev in 1955.

Despite his new-found freedom, Vakhtang yearned for two more things: he wanted to visit France one more time, and he wanted his medals back. His first wish came true in 2003. At the age of 82, he revisited his former area of operations on a trip funded by the French Ministry of Defence and the Conseil Général du Tarn. Then, at a ceremony in Tbilisi in July 2006, he became the first Georgian to be awarded the French légion d’honneur.

Photo credits: thank you, Pierre Kitiashvili, for supplying the two photos. Pierre lives in Georgia, and his grandfather was the man on the motorbike in the first photo.

Winemaking the Scottish way

25/1/2020

The historic Château de Mayragues near Gaillac is an ideal place to learn about natural wines. Biodynamic since 1999, organic since 2004, the vineyards are now run by Duncan Geddes, a second-generation Scottish winemaker (his French mother may see things differently).

Thank you, Duncan, for a fascinating discussion yesterday about your philosophy of winemaking. Because of wonderful people like you, researching my new book about the gastronomy of our region is proving much more taxing than writing about its history. All these dégustations are beginning to take their toll!

The Château de Mayragues dates from the 16th and 17th centuries and, along with its dovecote, it is classified as a historic monument. You can spend the night in the château – something I would recommend to anyone who wishes to sample all Duncan’s wines.

Who were the two dead soldiers?

11/1/2020

The Château de Garrevaques lies in the Lauragais, south-west France, and one day the owner shared a memory from her childhood, something that had happened a few years after the end of the second world war.

‘When I was old enough to run around in the grounds of the château my grandmother used to tell me never to play in one particular corner of the garden. A pair of iron crosses marked the graves of two German soldiers. When I was twelve or thirteen, the German army came and took them away.’

Marie-Christine Combes is the sixteenth generation of the same family to reside in the château, and this was one of many stories I had heard from her and her mother about the period when the Wehrmacht commandeered their home. I had often wondered about the identity of these soldiers, and no one seemed quite sure of their unit. Some sources said the troops occupying Garrevaques were from the eleventh panzer division, while others claimed they belonged to the infamous second panzer division, also known as Das Reich, and blamed for the atrocity at Oradour-sur-Glane. I had often speculated that this confusion was caused by the French way of abbreviating ordinal numbers: IIeme (deuxième - second) and 11eme (onzième - eleventh) are easy to confuse unless you spot that one uses Roman numerals and the other Arabic.

When I was researching the German Occupation for my book, I felt duty-bound to investigate more thoroughly. Garrevaques and my home lie in the Tarn, and the obvious place to start was in the departmental archives in Albi. But first, I went online to consult the list of dossiers which had not been digitised. From its title, 506 W 230 sounded promising: ‘German soldiers killed and buried in the department. Inquest: instructions and replies from the mayors (November-December 1944).’

The archives of the Tarn are run on strict and rather old-fashioned lines. Once you become an authorised user, you must fill in a form with the references of the dossiers you want to consult and you must hand in your request at the desk at 09.30 sharp, or subsequently at 45-minute intervals, again on the dot. And then you wait. Don’t even think of going to the desk with a request at 09.46 or 11.33!

I handed in my form, and while I waited, I wondered how many pages would be in the dossier. There are 323 communes in the Tarn, each with a mayor. If German soldiers were buried in all of them, I could be sifting through a lot of paperwork. Eventually I was called to the desk and handed a bundle of papers secured in a dogeared cardboard folder. I opened it up. Fortunately, there were only a couple of dozen pages so presumably the soldiers in Marie-Christine’s park had been an exception. The paper was fragile, the type of paper that is produced after five years of enemy occupation and world war.

I leafed through the sheets, still unconvinced I would find what I wanted. But then it appeared, an A5 scrap of paper, handwritten, signed by the mayor of Garrevaques and addressed to the Prefect of the Tarn. Someone had annotated the paper with the French translations of the date of birth, date of death and rank of each of the two men. And on the next page in the dossier the Prefect’s office had typed up the details, saving me the trouble of deciphering the mayor’s handwriting. In the interests of brevity, I shall give only the English translation of what was on the two pieces of paper.

TK de Dinatru 61, Sergeant Hilmar Büchner, born 18/2/1917, died 19/8/1944.
FEB 119, Lance-Corporal Alvis Gatuska, born 9/6/1913, died 19/8/1944.

This date of their deaths tied in with what I had read elsewhere. On 19 August, members of an unidentified Resistance group machine-gunned a German vehicle and killed two of its occupants on the road between Garrevaques and Revel. The wreck was towed back to the Château de Garrevaques, and the two casualties were buried in the park by their comrades.

I was still none the wiser on the question of second or eleventh, but after further research, I discovered that ‘TK de Dinatru 61’ was a supply troop division forming part of the eleventh panzers, and ‘FEB 119’ was an artillery regiment, again part of the eleventh panzers. I also learned that the eleventh panzer division had fought for two-and-a-half years on the Eastern Front and was nearly wiped out in early 1944 at the Battle of the Korsun-Cherkassy Pocket. The demoralised survivors were sent to south-west France and the division was rebuilt, mainly with reserve troops.

After the shooting of Sergeant Büchner and Lance-Corporal Gatuska, the villagers feared reprisals, but fortunately the Germans had more pressing business to occupy them. Four days earlier, the Allies had begun landing 50,000 troops on the coast near Marseilles and on 20 August the eleventh panzer division left Garrevaques and headed east to meet the Allies in the Rhône valley.

Château de Garrevaques.
The occupying troops turned this salon into their dining room and replaced the mirror with a portrait of Adolf Hitler.

If you want to know how they tried to blow up the château as they left, or read stories about their operations against the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire, you will find them in ‘Lauragais: Steeped in History, Soaked in Blood’, or if you visit the château’s hotel-restaurant, you may be lucky enough to hear some of these tales from Marie-Christine herself.

Why do Sergeant Büchner and Lance-Corporal Gatuska no longer lie in the park? Between 1958 and 1961, nearly 20,000 German soldiers were disinterred all across southern France and reburied together in the cemetery at Dagneux near Lyon. Most of them were killed after the Allied landings of August 1944.

Natural wines - lining up my work for the day

16/12/2019

Monday morning at the office isn’t always so bad! My task today is to continue exploring the world of natural wines. What’s that? you may ask. I spent yesterday afternoon trying to find out at the Glouglou natural wine fair in Durban-Corbières. Most of the exhibitors were certified organic, but they have all gone much further in their quest to minimise the artificial techniques used in most modern wine production.

Take Gilles Contrepois of the Domaine Grand Guilhem, for example. He has been organic since 2004, but to make his wine Le Pointilliste, he ferments hand-picked grapes in clay pots using only the natural yeasts which live on his vines and grapes, and he adds no, or minimal, sulphites. It’s a fair imitation of the practices used by the world’s first winemakers in the Caucasus 8,000 years ago, although Gilles doesn’t take authenticity to the extreme of burying his clay pots in the ground.

For others, such as Florian and Gaelle at the Domaine des Deux Clés, it means following the biodynamic principles of Rudolf Steiner. These include taking account of solar and lunar cycles, and using homeopathic preparations to improve the health of their soil and vines.

Jon and Elizabeth Bowen are an English couple who have been making organic wine in the Corbières since 2008. Jon told me he avoids using the term ‘natural wine’ because it has no official or generally-agreed definition. But he still calls one of his wines Pourboire Nature because, ‘There is nothing added. And nothing means no sulphur dioxide, no yeast, no tannins, no enzymes, no fining agents.’

All the exhibitors I spoke to at Glouglou agreed on one thing: being outside the constraints of an appellation gives them the freedom to be different. The flavours of their wines were certainly more intense and more varied than I have experienced at more conventional wine fairs.

Glouglou translates as glug-glug, but it was a much more sophisticated event than its name may suggest. It took place at Chez Lola, a mansion which on other days offers bed-and-breakfast. Upstairs, each bedroom had a couple of winemakers somewhere between the bed and the wardrobe, and on the ground floor, the lounge and dining room hosted eight more producers. The kitchen served quiche, cake, coffee, tea or water for anyone who was hungry or needed to cleanse his or her palette. It was a relaxed, homely environment, perfect for the discovery of natural wines, whatever they may be.

Will I have come up with a clearer definition by the time I have cleared my desk?

Climb every mountain (or the same one again and again and again)

5/12/2019

The Berniquaut, south-west France, is a modest mountain above Sorèze that has been frequented by Stone Age man, Celts, Romans, crusaders, bandits, and most recently by a couple of friends of Asterix the Gaul. None of the ancients were crazy enough to run up and down it fifteen times in six hours. Thirty kilometres, 3,000 metres of climbing, 3,000 metres of descent, tired legs. All for charity.

Photo by Aline Berthoumieu

In Sorèze with two of my latest readers

2/12/2019

Yesterday I was signing and selling copies of ‘Lauragais’ at the Christmas market in the Abbey of Sorèze. I also had time to photograph some of my latest readers.

Mary takes a keen interest in modern literature, whereas her master Tom is more into buying and selling antique and rare books.

If you share Mary’s literary tastes, choose the first link, or if you are in Tom’s camp, follow the link to his page on Abe Books.

The Abbey of Sorèze may have been founded as long ago as 754 under King Pepin the Short. It was attacked and pillaged many times over the centuries by, among others, the Normans, bands of unemployed soldiers during the Hundred Years’ War, and both Catholics and Protestants during the Wars of Religion. Louis XVI made it a Royal Military School, and it remained an educational establishment until 1991.

This statue of Pepin the Short is located in the abbey's park.

This bell tower is all that remains of the church of Saint-Martin after the Protestant siege of 1573.

Also in the abbey's park is a rare statue of Louis XVI. Only five remain in France, and one of those has lost its original head!

Today, the abbey complex houses the Dom Robert tapestry museum and the school museum.