Asterix and Obelix are French comic book characters, Celts, who resisted Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. When I was reading these comics to my kids, I assumed that the Celts in Brittany, a peninsula at the western edge of France, were the remnants of the larger Celtic population of Gaul, who like Asterix and Obelix, resisted Romanization. I was wrong. Today’s Bretons are the remnants of the Celtic population of Great Britain, pushed westward, like their Cornish and Welsh cousins, by the Anglo-Saxon invaders. Except these Celts had boats and re-Celticized, if that is a word, the tip of what is now Western France.
When Volendam landed in Brest, on the western tip of Brittany I wondered what Celtic influences we would find. Right off the bat there were our shuttle buses named Bihan (meaning “small,” both a place name and the name of the small Breton bagpipe) and Abers (meaning estuary). Both buses had the Triquetra or trinity knot painted on their sides. The Triquetra is a Celtic form with several interpretations, the eternal cycle of life, death and rebirth (or eternal hope) or perhaps earth, sea, and sky. In the Book of Kells, it represents The Trinity.
There were two shuttle bus routes. Abers took us into the city center, to the Jardin Kennedy. Street signs were in both French and Breton. Jardin Kennedy delighted us. It looks like the park is observing a “no mow May.” The grass was growing tall, and wildflowers abound. The formal part of the garden was not at all formal, but a gay profusion of flowers.
We walked through the garden rather than along Avenue Clemenceau when we heard someone haranguing through a bullhorn. What we found was curious. According to the guy doing technical set up we were watching the rehearsal of a theatrical production of Peter Pan on skateboards. Set in a skateboard park. In a newspaper article the director says “Youth is Not a Crime” is about the inevitable passage, in a way “the fall” from childhood to adulthood. The guy with the bull horn was riding around the park in a wheeled couch, while skateboarders zoomed around him and a base guitar played distorted surf riffs.
Then we walked. Brest was leveled during World War II so it filled with modern post war construction that Suzi calls “downtown Europe.” There is no rebuilt old town as in many other European cities. We walked by one church that looked, to me, like a power station.
What downtown lacks in appearance it makes up in flavor. We found Celtic culture in Breton bakery selling traditional Breton pastries including kouign-amann. Brittany Tourism says” “Anyone can try to make it, few get it right.” The one who made ours got it right. It’s yeasted dough rolled and folded with salted butter and sugar between the layers. It’s baked and, if done right, flaky and crunchy outside and buttery and melty on the inside. The other pastry we tried was a shortbread round with salted caramel.
No pics of the pastries, We ate them! Here is the Breton Flag.
We walked through downtown to an aerial tramway that took us across a tidal basin where we saw some of the drydocks that had been the cause of so much bombing in World War II.
Across the tramway is Ateliers de Capucins, “a cathedral to industry.” The district started as Capuchin monastery in 1695. During the French Revolution a century later, the military evicted the monks and turned it into a shipyard with foundries, machine tool factories and finally electrical workshops. They made marine engines. About 60 percent of the works were destroyed during World War II, but the bones of the buildings remained, and were reconstructed. In this century the area was repurposed into an arts district with workshops, cafes and performance spaces where the foundries and workshops used to be.
Following a walk through we took the aerial tramway back and walked by the fort, still an active military instillation and a museum, and the tower, also a museum, to where we took the other shuttle, Bihan, back to the ship.
