3rd of August we had the room until noon and could still discover the historic monuments of Poitiers which are going back to a celtic opidum which was turned by the Romans into a city called Pictavium. Since the second century Poitiers is known as a christian community which gained importance under the bishop Hilarius in the 4th century. 558 Radegundis of Thuringia founded the first monastery. 732 the Arabs and Moors were stopped at Poitiers by Karl Matell.
We were lucky to find a lady from the historian society of Poitiers how was willing to explain us all these contexts in the Baptistery Saint-Jean which is the oldest exiting building in France of the Christianity. It was based on a Roman private house and received an octagonal basin for baptism in the 5th century. The Romanic wall paintings show emperor Constantine the Great who was the first Roman emperor to allow the practice of all religious worship. She explained us how the ceremony was only for adults and meant to be entering the basin from the dark west to dive into the water and out towards the East where the sunlight symbolically Enlighted them. We were there at the perfect time because the precious Albaster was shimmering golden in the sunlight. A visitor who had studied in Poitiers remembered the building in the middle of a roundabout. The lady explained us the baptisterium even risked to be destroyed in the 19th century to make place for a grande Avenue, but was saved by the first historic preservation initiative of the citizens of Poitiers in France. We could have listened on and on to her expertise if we wouldn’t have had to leave our hotel room by 12:00.
We grabbed some sandwiches and started over some bike lanes out of town before we had to be creative to make our own mix of side roads to get further west because no more bike routes were anymore indicated to get to Ardin. We still had an unusual discovery at Saint-Marc-la-Lande where monks had created a church for their college which had twisted gothic columns like I had never seen before. The Saint James shell was also an element of the façade.
My bicycle tube still held its air pressure and we got closer to Ardin. The last architectural surprise was not far from our friends house a pigeonry of Pouzay. It was a tower offering 5.000 pigeons in 2.700 little niches to install their nests as the pigeons droppings was collected as a precious fertilizer. Already the pure architecture of this functional building was unique, but nowadays a huge oak tree replaced the roof.
Two more turns and we entered the gate of the “Logis de la Fosse” where our friends Günther and Daniel had created a little paradise.
