Fans of The West Wing will appreciate that I've been itching to use this post title since I arrived. Now I have the chance!
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| Trets's cathedral: cozy! |
On Sunday, during our weekly trip to the Trets market to get a roast chicken (there is a particular place we go, where the boys get chocolate suckers from the proprietress), we dropped in to the Trets cathedral. It is small and not always open for visitors, so we arrived 15 minutes before the service that morning. Normally they have their bells pealing (quite impressive given the size), but this morning they had some sort of gathering that was being blessed by the priest (bishop?) - they were carrying banners and wearing what I assume was traditional garb. Craig still managed to get a couple pictures of the interior, and you can see some of the group in the exterior picture.
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| the baptistry is the octagonal cut in the floor in the right-hand picture |
Lynn/Mum/Nana arrived the day before, and was understandably tired from her trip (an overnight flight to Paris, then 2.5 hours wait, then 3-hour train trip to Aix, then 45 minutes to Puyloubier), so she didn't make it to Trets with us. Instead, on Tuesday afternoon, she and Craig travelled to Aix to see the cathedral there. The feature of Cathédrale Saint-Sauveur that is always mentioned in the guide books is the baptistry, the pool of which is from the 6th century (the rest of the baptistry was built later; Wikipedia suggests that the columns are from a Roman temple, which is an admirable feat of recycling, even if questionable theologically). This is the only Catholic church I've seen with a place to do a real Baptist immersion-style baptism!
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