Description
The fourth in The Wandering Wayfarer Series, "The Magic of Mont Saint Michel" is beautifully captured by award-winning photographer, Mark A Paulda. Page after page are stunning photographs taken from the blue hour to the darkest skies of the night. Included is a re-print of Guy de Maupassant's "Legend of Mont St Michel." This is an epic collection showing Mont Saint Michel like it has not been seen before, and a must-have from The Wandering Wayfarer Series.
Mont Saint Michel is a small rocky islet, roughly one kilometer from the north coast of France at the mouth of the Couesnon River, near Avranches in Normandy, close to the border of Brittany. It is home to the unusual Benedictine Abbey Church (built between
the 11th and 16th centuries) which occupies most of the one kilometer diameter clump of rocks jutting out of the ocean.
It is connected to the mainland via a thin natural land bridge, which before modernization was covered at high tide, and revealed at low tide. Thus, Mont Saint Michel gained a mystical quality, being an island half the time, and being attached to land the other :
a tidal island.
In 708 the Archangel Michael appeared to Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, and commanded him to build a chapel on the top of Mont Tombe, a rocky island in the middle of an immense bay. Overawed by this apparition, Aubert obeyed and built a sanctuary to the glory of God and Archangel Michael.
Throughout its long history, Mont Saint Michel has had many roles. First a religious sanctuary with its monastic communities, it became a place of worship with its immense pilgrimages, a centre of intense academic activity with its production of
manuscripts and illuminations, a symbol of national resistance with the glorious feats of arms of its knights and a formidable prison when the priests were ousted in the French Revolution of 1789, putting an end to the religious vocation of Mont Saint
Michel.
In 1870 Mont Saint Michel ceased to be a prison. It became a historic monument which gradually became a tourist centre. The religious vocation of Mont Saint Michel was re-established in 1965 with the arrival of monastic communities from Jerusalem perpetuating Mont Saint Michel’s thousand-year old spiritual heritage.
In 1972 UNESCO classified Mont Saint-Michel as a “natural and cultural World Heritage Site”. Mont Saint Michel is also called one of the “wonder of the Occident."