Touring Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, France скачать в хорошем качестве

Touring Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, France

🔊🎶 Seeing Mont Saint-Michel with my own eyes felt as exhilarating as when I saw the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, or India’s Taj Mahal for the first time. There’s just something magical about actually being in the presence of an iconic #UNESCOWorldHeritage site that you’ve only previously known from pictures in print or video. With #MontStMichel—the famous imposing Gothic abbey, built on a massive rock on a tidal island in the middle of a bay—the most exciting moment of witnessing it in real life is during the slow approach to get there. While some people opt to wait and take the free shuttle from the parking lot, folks like me walk the 40 minutes from the visitors center, beyond the meadows of grazing sheep and then over a bridge. Mostly built in the late 10th century, #MontSaintMichel is the greatest #medieval architectural work of Western Europe that still endures today, argues my tour guide Marie Anne. “It worked, because after 1000 years, YOU are here,” she said. Legend has it that archangel Michel told the Bishop of Avranches to start building it in the 8th century, but according to Marie Anne, that’s a merely a religious fabrication to give it a divine purpose. Its real purpose was to serve as an imposing fortress in a strategic, intimidating position—and on uneven rock, no less—to maximize a show of dominance and wealth of the king. That said, the abbey did serve a religious purpose for monk—but only monks coming from rich families. Situated in Normandy, the crossroads of England and France in the time when William the Conqueror was both the King of England and the Duke of Normandy, Mont St-Michel was heavily funded by both English and French kings, and families of both aristocracies. It was kind of like a rich person’s gated community, home of the 1%. It did serve as a stronghold though; during the Hundred Years War between England and France in the 14th–15th centuries, it remained French and became a symbol of #French resilience. Learning about the inside of the abbey—its church, cloisters, chapels, meetings halls, scriptoriums, crypts, prisons, and prisoner-powered “hamster wheel” crane mechanism—was interesting, but my overall takeaway of my experience will always be its exterior, seeing it from a distance. — Touring Mont Saint-Michel, up, close, and faraway, in #Normandy, #France. 🇫🇷 #theglobaltripnormandy #theglobaltripnormandie #theglobaltripfrance