Legends of Death

Out in the wild far corner of northwestern France lies a foreign country, with a foreign language, called Brittany. As I have said on numerous occasions, one aspect of living in France I particularly enjoy is all the visible history. In Breton culture, legends around the character known as Ankou, sort of the equivalent to our Grim Reaper, abounded. And if you hunt a little bit in off the beaten track churchyards, you may just stumble on figures like these carved in rough hewn granite. Images like these served to remind the illiterate that their time here on this Earth was not without limits... which is something I try to recall every day. A few hundred years early, these images could well have served as album illustrations for that unparalleled musical group, the Grateful Dead...
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Now, if this doesn't beat all, as I finished writing this post, just out of curiosity I typed "Ankou" into Google just to see if I could find a site that could tell me more about Ankou... and the very first reference that came up was for the French Wikipedia site , which had an article and a photo which you can see if you click the link. My jaw dropped, the photo is the same Ankou I just posted, the caption says "Ankou dans la Roche-Maurice, Finistere", and La Roche-Maurice is indeed where I took the below photo just a few weeks ago... it is a small hilltop village between Landernau and Landivisiau. Well I am fit to be tied... of all the places they could have found a photo of Ankou, it just happened to be the very same one that I found, purely by chance. Well, I like my photo better, taken in the rays of the setting sun, Ankou here is literally glowing, while the one on the Wikipedia site is cold and pale...
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