Candes-Saint-Martin

If our family has a patron saint, it must be St. Martin of Tours, in France. Who, by the way, selects one’s patron saint? Must happen at a higher level than down here… To be sure St. Martin was born in what is Hungary today. My ancestors chose his name to supplement their own, calling the family Szentmartoni Darnay, or Darnay of St. Martin. Then our youngest, Michelle, went to Tours as an exchange student and later settled there to go to school and lived just blocks from the St. Martin Cathedral. Before Michelle was born we lived near Trier in Germany, one of the places where Martin served as a soldier on his slow journey toward France. Links upon links.

Michelle did some travelling around Christmas and visited a place about 39 miles south-west of Tours called Candes-Saint-Martin, a tiny village now of under 300 people but with a bishop’s palace where St. Martin was once the episcopus. She sent Brigitte and me each a little lapel pin of a view of Candes-Sain-Martin. A much-enlarged image of that place is shown below.

The picture is the work of Manfred Heyde accessible on Wikipedia (here). The view of Candes is from the eastern shore of the Loire at the point where one of the Loire’s tributaries, the Vienne, enters the larger river. Candes, incidentally, is thought to be a Gallic term meaning “confluence.”

St. Martin was born either in 316 or 336 AD; both years have some support, but controversy surrounds both. I prefer 336. It would mean that I was born 1600 years after St. Martin. He died in 397 either at 61 or 81 years of age. Martin is best remembered in the image of a soldier who, meeting a freezing beggar along a road near Amiens in France cut his own cloak in half so that the beggar could be covered. Life is all about simple acts of kindness. Some will never to be forgotten.

The image above is from Wikipedia (link) by Eva Kröcher, Frankfurt am Main.

Pogácsa - You’ve Come a Long Ways

In virtually every Hungarian fairy tale, when the young protagonist sets out on the great adventure, he or she (always very poor, of course) carries a supply of ash-baked pogácsa as the way-bread that will sustain. Pogácsa is most closely related to the scone of the Anglo-Saxon world. It is short-bread, quite crumbly, and the shortening used, at least in the fairy tales, is bacon fat. The old-fashioned, the real thing, was quite grey in color and looked like the inserted picture (courtesy of a Hungarian blog here). Pogácsas just like that were baked in our house—in an oven, to be sure, rather than in hot ashes as in the tales. We actually loved to eat them. They had a layered feel and crumbled in the mouth, and carried memories of bacon.

I was trying to remember the name and expected it to be hidden away forever, but suddenly it was there, about a minute after the effort of remembering. Ashbaked pogácsa—hamubasült pogácsa. Today I discovered that the romantic associations I’ve always had with this scone or bisquit have remained alive and well in Hungary. Indeed it is a very popular food product. It recently even hosted a national festival. And humble ash-pogácsa has come a long, long ways.

Wikipedia even has an article on the subject and shows a nice picture of the modern style of this product, shown here above another picture equally glorious. The sources in turn are here and here. Pogácsa may be also be made with yeast dough and combined with all kinds of fillings—cheese, pork, cabbage—and seasoned in all sorts of ways. What surprised me most, however, is that the Hungarian pogácsa and the Italian foccacio are close relatives, at least in name. Wikipedia tells me that the Hungarian name came from the Latin panis focacius (bread baked on the hearth).

Wow! That goes back a long ways. But then, come to think of it, Hungary was once Pannonia, a Roman possession, and St. Martin of Tours, the family patron, as it were, was once a Roman soldier who went west from Pannonia when a higher calling came. I bet that he carried a cloth full of pogácsa as he set off more or less bound for very distant Gallia.

Marking the Day

In the old world—where we come from—people celebrate Memorial Day on November 11th under various names, in the English speaking world usually as Remembrance Day. This wouldn’t be Ghulf Genes if, on such a day, I failed to note the coincidence of November 11th with the feast day of St. Martin of Tours, Martinmas. St. Martin, a fourth century figure, plays a prominent role in the life of the older members of our clan. Our formal family name is Szentmartoni Darnay; translated directly from the Hungarian that means “Darnay of St. Marin.” St. Martin was born in Pannonia, the name by which the Romans called what later became Hungary. He came from Savaria (Szombathely) on the western edge of Hungary, where my family had sunk down its Hungarian roots after drifting east from German lands in anno long ago. Martin was a soldier who wandered West, like we did, became a monk, and died in Tours, in France. Now by sheer coincidence (if there is such a thing) when our daughter, Michelle, applied as a student for a year’s stay in France under the AFS foreign exchange program (that program itself a product of war, on which subject see more here), she was assigned to a family in Tours, France. And later yet, when she returned to France to study there, she settled in Tours again and lived within three blocks of St. Martin’s Cathedral in the old, medieval part of the city.

We have our own November 11th holiday in this country, Veteran’s Day. But as Wikipedia rightly suggests, our May memorial is more akin in spirit to Remembrance Day as celebrated in the old world. There it is a day on which, as Brigitte remembers, it was customary to visit cemeteries to remember the departed. My father barely escaped death on the battle field; one of his brothers, Lászlo, died in that war. My mother lost her youngest brother, Loli. Loli gave me an ingenious, small wind-up elephant—it could walk across the table—about four weeks before the battle field claimed him. Brigitte lost an uncle, Fritz, her cousin her husband-to-be, Otto. All of these men fell in World War II—and on the other side. We remember them still with that strange quiet that time brings. And it is well to remember that all sides have memories. Since then, although men have served under arms—and a great-grand-son of ours does today—we have been spared the ultimate sacrifice, for which we give thanks—even as we reach out to those who still lose sons and daughters to the unending conflict of this earthly realm.

Cultural Landscape

The word in German (Kulturlandschaft) has just a little more bite, but to explain that fully would take up space. People who really possess multiple languages so that these manifest spontaneously in the head experience this problem now and then. The same word in another language simply conveys much more or has an extra dimension, what sometimes people astutely call a resonance.

When I first came to America I felt alienated because the architecture was all wrong. Leaving town I always had a sense of liberation, of once more being home, of breathing properly again. Soon we moved to another house, across from what we called Guillam Park (in Kansas City). Near us, easy walking distance, was the Rockhill Nelson Art Gallery; it topped a hilly region surrounded by upscale but tightly clustered and massively tree-shaded residences. The Gallery rapidly became for us a focus, shrine, object of weekly pilgrimages. From up there, on its stately terrace facing South, our eyes could sweep over expanses of cultivated gardens and lawns—and in the far, far distance, but visible, stood Midwest Research Institute (the arts and the sciences, as it were, arrayed face to face). Little did I dream then, in my edgy teens, that someday I would work there.

The picture here presents a view of one corner the Gallery in the distance, but as seen from MRI. In the foreground is the Volker fountain. It features St. Martin of Tours on horseback—a figure who looms very large in our family in many ways, not least in that he forms part of our “noble” name: Darnay of St. Martin. A charming feature of this fountain is the figure of a naked angel, a young boy, high a-top a pole, playing a flute but holding it the wrong way around—and wearing a wrist-watch. MRI isn’t visible but is behind the photographer.

Very nice. But this area, the Nelson Gallery raised, science in the flatlands, this imprint of culture, was, alas, just one of a few pocketses (as Gollum in Lord of the Rings would have it) in an otherwise theme-less and sometimes ugly, vast spread of structures, buildings, parking lots, and billboard-bearing thoroughfares. By contrast any small town in Europe—and especially in Italy, say—has another imprint difficult to capture analytically. But you sure as hell know that now you’re looking at a cultural landscape. Everything fits it. Everything proclaims its presence, somehow. It is the look of Christendom. (The next shot I owe to Michelle’s site, here.)

Back in those days I didn't understand the matter fully. In those days I used the labels Europe and America, and I assumed that Europe had culture and America lacked it. But many years later I received the needed corrective. We set out from Paris by car to drive to Tours. Yes. Our family’s links to St. Martin are densely woven. Having finally left the city behind, we began to pass through a landscape that—oh, my God—looked just like America, in general and in detail, and worst of all, in spirit. And I realized the truth. What I called Kulturlandschaft was simply the past, its traces still shaping the wax of matter from another time. And what I beheld in the United States, and increasingly everywhere, is the shape of values current in Modernity. The old persists—but it has become the achievement of small groups or individuals. “The sea of faith was once, too, at the full…” (Coleridge).

Architects' Lace

These pictures courtesy of Michelle, Ghulfdom’s permanent ambassador to France. She took the first photo during her recent vacation to Candes-Saint-Martin, a lovely old town south-west of Paris in the valley of the Loire. The name of the place, evoking St. Martin, famously of Tours, but born in Hungary—and furthermore lending his name and fame to our own family, which is known as Szentmartoni Darnay, gives this gate, photographed because it caught Michelle’s eye, special significance. The town is also south and west of Tours, where St. Martin ended his days and where Michelle lived and went to school… But on this subject some other time.

With that photo in her camera, Michelle read my post on Wrought Iron in which I evoke memories of Paris and of window sills. She went right out and took some pictures in her neighborhood. And those are now here to see, instantly, as it were, thanks for the invisible lace of electromagnetism. Until I got her e-mail I had not heard the charming description of wrought iron as “architects’ lace.”