From Riou with love... Postcard May 2008
Ramblings of a Solitary Stroller
The Archipelago of Riou
Plane - Grand Conclu - Petit Conclu - Riou - Jarre - Jarron - Les
Mogliades -Les Impériaux
This web site is to document a discovery of an archaelogical site on the
Island of Riou in 1962 by my father , Dr. Georges Albert.
He came to Marseille to do his military duty and fell in love with the
region. He joined a hillclimbing club and started roaming the
hills taking pictures around 1929.
He soon became a passionate "grimpeur", and as a member of the Club
Alpin Français worked on doing descriptions of the hill climbs. The maps of the
area were not adequate, so he became a surveyor and realized the 2 maps
of the Massif de Marseilleveyre, and of the Massif de Puget. They are
the base of the 2 books he wrote during the war , describing the
hill climbs of the region called Les Calanques. The descriptions were supported by
photographies. So many, that the book was too onerous to print and
remained unpublished until today. You will find it under the "Escalades"
section, and you will find the maps of the area in the "Cartes" section
of the front page.
In Provence water is scarce. My
father, who at the age of 10 had mapped with the gardener his family
property near Lyon and recorded the 2 springs there, had noticed that
the name of the cove on the island of Riou suggested the presence of a
spring. "Fontagne", similar word , fontaine in French, fons,fontis in latin, obviously
the word roots pointed to water.
The island is subjected to violent storms beginning in August, and the
Puits des Chèvres on the other end of the island fills up with 2 feet of
water.
Simple hole in a clay depression, typical of the karstic limestone,
surrounded by rocks put there, we thought, by the goat keepers who
rented the island during the last five centuries. In the 15th
century, in 1442 to be exact,Marseille built a house and a cistern for the watch guards, and
that construction is located to the north of the peak called Pic
Occidental at the
end of the vallon de l'Aiglon. It collects the
rain water which runs down the rocky face .
During the summer of 1962 my father was restoring the above cistern on the island of Riou , when a storm filled it with 3 feet of water. As he could not carry on with his work, he decided to go check on a hole he had started to dig in the cove of Fontagne, near a wall made of dry stones. Water had also collected in that hole during the rainstorm, so he dug it up and restored it too. He found some potsherds and showed them to Fernand Benoit, who had been the top archaeologist in Marseille since the war. Benoit told him the bits were massaliote pottery from 600 BC. By then he was surveying the area, and recorded the steps of his digging.
The discovery happened as I was leaving for the
USA to indulge in my passion for automobile racing.
I never was really
involved, but for the occasional find of the collar of a massaliote amphora ,
which I retrieved while snorkelling in the cove of Fontagne.
When my father passed away in 1991 , I hung
my father's maps in the living room, and stored away a box of artifacts
in the cellar, and all his notebooks in a plastic container. The islands
were bought by the Conservatoire du Littoral and quickly were made
off-limit to the public. I was content enough to watch my island
and to take pictures of oustanding sunsets and storms.
and one of my favorites with the sun setting on the ninth of september behind the
lighthouse of Planier which is a true island of the Bay of Marseille
We were still very much involved in racing in
F1 and Offshore until 5 years after losing my father I also lost my
husband Peter Weismann. My life went on for a while, mainly in Offshore thanks to my
dear friend from my Ferrari years, Dott. Ingegnere Carlo Chiti, who
also passed away.
My sons Christopher and Patrick took over my business. My passions
had run their courses.
One day, I received a fax from my mother asking if she could give the
map of Riou to the guard of the Conservatoire du Littoral who wanted to
scan it. I said okay
on one condition, to be taken to the island, for my memories were
fading and I could not make much sense of the 50 pages and drawings my
dad had written to relate his work during 4 years. Little did I know that it would spin me towards archaelogy .
True to his word , Alain Mante took me to the island in 2003.
Impressed by my father's maps , he wanted to set-up an exhibit, and
looking for support he came to my home with Mr. Drocourt, architect of
the Atelier du Patrimoine, and
Lucien- François Gantes , municipal archaeologist of the town of Marseille.
I took out the potsherds, cleaned them a little, set them up on the
terrace.
On arrival, LF Gantes took one look at them and said "It is
what we have: Dressel 7/11 from -50 to +50."
From the bottom of my ignorance I had to ask what was a dressel 7/11 and
I was told that during 100 years there was on the island a tuna fishing
industry using that particular type of amphorae.
When I protested that Benoit himself had pronounced the sherds to be
greek/massaliote from the 6th century BC, Gantes replied that Benoit did
not care for the Romans, and preferred that everything be Greek!
Later while discussing the skeleton, I explained that Mr Charles of the
Anthropology Museum of Paris had identified him as a Macedonian about 35
years of age, about 400 to 600 years old, Gantes told me impatiently:
"These are post-war theories. One cannot deduce the race by the shape of
a skull..
Not that I cared that in one afternoon he had trashed the conclusions
of his distinguished colleagues, but it was throwing a rock in my pond.
Having found in my father's notebooks the story of the discovery of the
Fons, I was thinking about having it published. There were some erroneous
stories going around, and I wanted to put an end to them since I had the
document. I was also intrigued by the fact that Gantes picking up a
handle declared it to be from Betique, another to be Dressel 2/4.
Things had changed since 1962 and the potsherds could be
identified.. I asked LF Gantes if he would help me identify them, and he
kindly accepted.
I started off by putting 77 pages on the floor one per tesson (artifact)
, numbered them, drew them, in an attempt to get familiar with them. When I went to
the Atelier du Patrimoine in Marseille, LFG showed me a drawer full of
bits , similar to mine, but from the other cove, and then proceeded to
give me a quick course and some drawing tricks. He suggested I'd buy the book
"Amphores..comment les identifier" written by Martine Sciallano,diver
and
conservateur
of the Museum of Istres.
Not wanting to tire my new contact I had not taken all of the artifacts.
I gathered another bunch and went to Istres. Frederic Marty, young
ceramic expert was put to the test, then Martine Sciallano joined us and
they identified some handles as coming from Tarraconaise and Lusitania,
one bit being a mortar, another a roof tile rather "recent". The Museum
small but stuffed with amphorae is a jewel. The building dates from the
XVIIth century. Lots of books to buy, Ms Sciallano being very active in
presenting exhibits. I picked "20000 Pots sous les Mers" because
it was set-up like Jules Verne's 20000 Leagues Under the Sea with
Gustave Doré's illustrations. It had nothing to do with the Greeks or
the Romans, but
was about an exposition of glazed pottery from Mediterranean wrecks. As
I write this, I am told that Istres is about to lose Martine. She is to
move to Hyères, to head a new museum, I would guess mainly concerned
with Olbia, a military outpost of Massalia. Great news!!
By the end of 2004, I was beginning to have a serious collection of
books, including les Etudes Massaliètes, and I was discovering my home
town past.
After the war, Fernand Benoit was the big boss of archaeology. The
Germans had done him a favor by blowing up the old town in Marseille: Scared by the
slash-your-throat look of the place, they kicked everybody out and blew
up the middle-age section choosing to leave one building standing in a show of
culture (?!) or maybe explosive precision. Unfortunately
for Benoit, he could not leisurely have a go at finding the greek
settlement. Reconstruction had to happen. But he did find the theater,
the roman docks, a huge ionic capital re-employed in the docks, maybe a
relic of the temples mentionned by Strabon?
While my father came from Lyon, my maternal family was from the agora of Marseille
and like many marseillais had a cabanon in a small fishing village of Les
Goudes, where the road around the bay runs into the superb white rocky
hills called Le Massif des Calanques.
Around 1952, a friend of ours from Les Goudes, Gaston Christianini was
fishing with the help of a new invention: air bottles. He found a spot full of amphorae near
the islands of the Grand and Petit Conclu or Congloué. He was
diving deep , and was victim of the bends. The French Navy had a
caisson in Toulon but
from what I am told, some time passed before he
was taken there, and he remained paralyzed from the waist down. His
discovery was taken over by Cousteau and Benoit. The Calypso was
anchored over the wreck. It was the beginning of underwater archaeology,
the commercialization of the aqualung, and the making of Cousteau
Superstar.
Benoit was now overwhelmed with artifacts from the sea
time-capsules . He was having to rethink many things, and as his student
Jean Courtin explained his style, he went at it with a shovel, and not
with a brush like they do today. So he made big mistakes: he did not
fathom that the wood they found in the wreck was not the deck of the
roman ship , but the bottom of another wreck which had settled down on top
of the other one, some 300 years later, mixing up the artifacts, and
sending Benoit to the wrong conclusion that the land dated ceramics were
mistakenly dated. So what! He was inventing methods, conceiving new
ideas about trade. He does not need as a feather in his cap to be called
the inventor of the Conclu wreck.
Gaston Christianini is the man who found it. Without him all this would still be
at the bottom of the sea covered with barnacles. Unsung hero of
underwater archaeology, Gaston after his accident went back to scuba
diving. He would shuffle across the square throwing his legs around in
order to walk to the harbor and reach his boat "Joie de vivre" .. A smile
from ear to ear, in his wet suit, this is how I remember him.
Towards the end of 2004, I told Alain that I was done with my
artifacts , and that I had just about decided to set-up a website rather
than try to find a publisher.
He asked me if I was interested in identifying their collection.
His staff visits the islands regularly to tag the endangered species of
birds, and they find bits and pieces. They collect them to eventually
pass them onto Gantes. I said yes before I looked at them..
I was also taking a course " Introduction to Archaeology" in
a local college near my home in California. Dr. Breece , who had worked
at Lascaux, did not talk much about the Greeks. I wanted to eventually
be able to participate in a dig, so I did enjoy his course about
prospecting, about the archaïc indian societies who left
kjoekken-moddings near my home by the Back Bay of Newport Beach. An
artifact found there by my kids turned out to be a scrapper. We had an
outing with archaeologists friends on the trails of Shoshone Indians
once, found some quartz, some metate.
My father whose ancestors came from Limousin and Haute Vienne had taken
us to Les Eyzies, on a trip back from the 24 hours of Le Mans. Mocking
his sister who was deeply involved in the genealogy of the Albert
family, he told us that Cromagnon was our real ancestor. And of course
with Lascaux, Chauvet and Cosquer, the paleolithics are the stars in
France. Not so much in the US, especially with Cosquer. I must admit
that when I heard there were drawings of penguins, the thought
crossed my mind that it was an histoire Marseillaise! (The Marseillais are always accused of exaggerating their accounts to
make them more interesting to the audience). And of course Cosquer did
not reveal his findings for 5 years which made it look suspicious for
the wrong reasons. The
polemic that surrounded the anouncement, the difficulties of entering
the cave seem to have left a bad taste to every body. I will come
back to this later.
So here I was, really concerned about finding as much as possible about
the Massalietes, and I was forced to learn about other cultures. But in
my horizon was looming a person which the French call
"incontournable", meaning you can't get around him and you
find him everywhere. He had done
digs on the island just after the time my father ended his work there,
he had written papers about the sea level, he was the master of Cosquer.
Jean Courtin was THE expert in neolithics, way up on the totem pole of the south of France
archaeology. I had to meet him!
LF Gantes told me that he was retired and a recluse in his farm in Haute
Provence .
In class at OCC in Los Angeles, I requested a video about Cosquer, and for the first time saw
Jean Courtin, sitting at the back of the boat, shoulder to shoulder
with Henri Cosquer, the two of them in wet suits, two burly guys, with a
beard, in front of the cliff which towers 160 feet over the entrance of
the cave . In that video Jean Clottes was the narrator, watching the
"dig" on a TV screen.
Dr. Breece mentionned Jean Clottes was in
California giving a lecture on Chauvet. I went there, and asked for
Courtin's adress. I carefully composed a letter as I was ready to head back
to France for the summer.
Meanwhile, Alain's tessons were starting to be a problem: They were
pretty much all glazed , and when I suggested taking them to LF Gantes , he bowed
out saying he was out of his league and I needed to go to Aix en
Provence to the library at the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences
Humaines! And had I read the book which had just come out "Les Iles Côte
à côte" ? Strabon, a roman geographer mentions the Stoechaedes
Islands , but there are quite a few groups of islands which could fit
the name. The book deals with all the french archipelagoes along the coast
of Southern France, the archipel de Riou included, and thought to be the
small Stoechaedes. The big ones being in front of Hyères and Olbia the
Massalia military outpost.
The island of Maïre is very likely the Immadras Positio, a positio
normally being a cape , but as I discovered this year, when you arrive
from Italy, Maïre is not detached from the mainland and looks very
prominent. This view from a remaining farossium of Cape Sicié near
Toulon. The foreground is the site of another Massalia military outpost Taureis, now
Le Brusc and the islands of Les Embiez.
I bought the book, read it, I also read 20,000 Pots sous les Mers trying to identify some of the tessons found near the watch tower of Riou. Taking a walk around my home I saw a piece of clay with a green glaze similar to what I had been looking at , and when I looked up I saw a wall made of dry stones. Clambering to it, I found what look like the base of a guard tower, and when I emerged through the pine trees covering it, I could see Riou! I was so excited one would think I had just met Harrison Ford in Jurassic Park. Same pottery, same towers, round, 4m in diameter, I had just read in Bouillon-Landais that windmills, watch towers were build that way until the 16th century. Could it be a watch tower from 1300 on?
18
th century pitchers (Port d'Alon left), (Riou right)
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Cabin in Port d'Alon |
Watch tower in Erbalunga built by the Genoese |
Some of the tessons from Riou looked like petals of a daisy. It looked like a 13th century bowl on 20000 Pots. I made an appointment to see Jean-Christophe Treglia at the MMSH, and took off to Aix en Provence. While walking through the lobbies in search of the library, I realized the names near each door were the authors of the articles I had just read in Les Iles Côte à Côte. Seeing the potsherds, J-C Treglia took me to meet Lucy Vallauri of the LAMM: She turned out to be one of the authors of 20,000 Pots and of many other books of the many exhibits she had realized, and of emergency digs.
No, my piece was not 13th century, it was 16th century pisan import, with A
Stecca decoration, but another one was 14th century rosé pisan, and my
green emerald local 18th century. I was so impressed I had to buy some of
her books, and I ended up carrying home one about white and blue tiles
used to decorate fireplaces!
Reading it I recognized I actually owned 2 of them, from 1750 , made in
the Montpellier area. These 2 tiles framed in steel had been in my great
grand-mother kitchen before being relegated in our cabanon in Les
Goudes, until I picked them up for my own kitchen.
That year when I arrived in Port d'Alon there was a 3-page letter from the recluse Jean Courtin giving me all sorts of exciting details about his work, the bulletin he had published years ago about the dating of what he had found on the island, recommendations on where to find the pot which made Riou the most ancient neolithic site in Southern Provence.
Ornementation of this pot is made with the shell of the cardium, which has given its name to the Cardial Culture( Palais Longchamps - Musée d'Histoire Naturelle)
Grinding stones found in La Sabliere
Culture(
Palais
Longchamps - Musée d'Histoire Naturelle)
Looking to volunteer for a dig I went to meet some PHD students near the Cap Couronne where one can see the remnants of a quarry used by the Greeks of Massalia to build their ramparts.
T
he young woman played docent around the neolithic site dug by Escalon de Fonton, and suggested that I leave them to their fine dig and go visit the Musée de Chateauneuf Les Martigues.
So close to what can be found on Riou, I felt I was
finally getting
somewhere. Forever a student, I was really enjoying myself . I was
meeting passionate people, I was getting a grasp of the history of the
island which was becoming more personal and so alive. My only regret was
not to be able to discuss it with my father. When I was reading about
his disappointment about the cistern filling up with brackish water, I
found myself wishing I could tell him that the tessons were serving to
put fish in salt, so a little more a little less.. and also that these
guys were going to the other end of the island looking for water, and
that right across la Grande Candelle, his domain of the 50s, there was a
miraculous cave full of paintings, and from there, at the time of
the Cromagnons one could go to Riou on foot.
Everything in its own time.. 25 years ago I could not have envisioned
doing a web site to publish his work. Marvel of technology.. in 3 years
I have come from ignorance to confusion. I have had to struggle with
digital photography, archaeology, learning websites, reading tens of
books. At least I can correct my mistakes as I go along.
I hear my father say :" It is not necessary to hope to start working,
nor to succeed to persevere"! Tough program, but all I need is to look
out of my window to find the most extraordinary boost there is
(Cliché M.Weismann)
Riou sunrise
Navire de Pierre Ancré dans le Mistral
(Jean Courtin)
Stone Ship anchored in the Mistral
When I was in Dearborn working for Ford, a post card of Riou was facing
me above my desk.
My island in the sun was the only thing I missed
while I was discovering America.
Riou is beautiful, but not very generous.
It is an island in the sun,
but there is a shadowy side imposed by man .
It seems quite
close, but it has a tough side . It is full of extremes, without
being very big.
There is a beautiful beach of blond sand, but also some
breathtaking cliffs,
sweet-smelling lilies and bare , sun baked,
dazzling white urgonian sandstone.
30000 years ago when it was attached to the continent, it was just
another hill,
but now as an island she is unique and lovely.
This is the fabulous cove of the island: La plage du Vallon de l'Aiglon
Alain Mante never passes an opportunity to talk with
people who have had something to do with Riou. He also is curious to
find out who constructed the various dry-stone walls on the island
and when. He was interested in my father's map, because it names
different points. The region is quite poor, and difficult to reach, but
it is not very far from the first city built in France 2600 years ago by
the greeks from Phokaia , now Foça in Turkey. There was a lot of trade going on
by boat, right through the Roman times, a lot of pirating all the
way trough the Middle Ages until the 19th century, a lot of exploiting the meager ressources
right through the 19th century.
Because of their strategic positions the islands have been used as
look-outs from the time of the Greeks. But during the last Ice age, when
the sea level was 120 meters down from where it is today, the area
was part of the continent, the trees were pines and silver birch, the
fauna was horses, bisons, deer and penguins. This is when the entrance
of the Cosquer Cave was in the open air and the Cromagons were
5000 years ago, men and women were breaking this jar and cooking over this campfire !
Even with a small piece , one is amazed to find out that size is always important, and the reinforcements can be ingenious and artistic at the same time.
Fossilized eggshell, Sea snails, patella Beginning of a handle decorated with three coils
2
bits of flint collected by Jacques Collina-Girard, MMSH geologist and
diver
Top left fossilized eggshell found by Alain Mante..
to each, his own area of expertise!
When I first met LF Gantes, Alain gave him the heel of a stone ax made of polished green stone he had found in a rabbit hole. LF Gantes remarked pleasantly: "Where would the archaeologist be without the rabbits". I never thougth of taking a picture then , so I am borrowing pictures from Jean Courtin
How to knock a tree down with a stone ax . Alain's find is of green stone and about a 1/3 of this one, similar to the one found on Riou
2100 Years ago the Tuna Fishermen who were feeding the Roman Legions were drawing water from the water hole in Fontagne
Near the golden beach of Riou is the site of a fishing
industry that lasted at least 100
years around the beginning of the
first millenium. The 20th century destruction of the cabins erected on the site
have helped to hide the artefacts among the roof tiles and bricks. But
one can still find some tuna vertebrae of an epoch when amphorae were
wide-collared in order to be filled with fish and salt. La Provincia of
the Romans was experiencing an economic boom due to the settling of
veterans along the paved roads leading to the riches of Spain and the
north. The Romans loved and needed a lot of fish and the accompanying
sauce made of marinated innards. Broken bits of these amphorae are all
around the cove. At least one of them was used in the construction of
the cabins 18 centuries later. It belongs to a Dressel 20 which was an
oil amphora made in Spain.
2000 year-old tuna vertebra
I have related how I heard the name of Dressel
for the first time.
This german archaeologist studying amphorae in Rome made a list of 45
different styles and give them some numbers.For example, a Dressel 1A
is an italian amphora to transport wine from -200 -100 , the
variation Dr1B follows in the years -100 à -25.
As I was still looking for fieldwork I came across ArchaeoSpain offering 2 weeks of digging on the Testaccio in Rome
You just have to bend to pick a piece!
Professor Remesal was looking for "Hadrian's wall", a wall of amphorae unbroken between the old part of the hill, and the added ramp. We were piling up the bits in plastic boxes, soaking them in acid water, then transferring them to a container filled with water, and there 4 american slaves would brush all day long and clamored with delight when finding some epigrafia which would be put in a special box
Beta is the name of the merchant, under it the black roman numeral give the weight of oil
At the bottom of our hole we never found the wall of amphorae you can see on the picture from the previous year. We found only the dating of the customs of the time of Commode, 189 A.D., 60 years too late. I enjoyed finding the small pink covers which would close the amphora
I liked finding the Bizacena, and the Tripoli, the Orientales so
refined compared to the Dressel 20.
We were collecting the "forma" besides epigrafia. The
boxes were piling up and the Spaniards began reconstructing the puzzles
by finding the collar, the handles, the epigrafia from a same amphora.
One would copy it on a transparent velum ; one would fill pages of
details about the reconstructed amphora. They only have the right to
take their data home. I took home a flu, as it was raining every other
day, and an indigestion of Dressel 20! They are everywhere: not a
museum which does not sport one! You find them even on Riou!
As LF Gantes had claimed the main style of amphora on the island is
Dressel 7/11 . This is also a Betique production soon adopted and copied by the
Massaliotes for transporting fish. The wine jars are of italian
red clay , the fine dishes a mixture of Campanian dishes, and local copies. The
jars cover the hills around the cove, but proper surveying is needed to
try to spot the vats required to macerate the fish in salt. An area of
300m2 has been occupied for 200 years recently. The modern cistern
gathering water from a tile roof could have been a
roman vat. As my father discovered the fishermen had to go to the other
cove to get some water. They paved the area around the water hole, made
it bigger. From what I have seen they were also going to the other side
of the island to fetch some water . Were they tending goats too? There
is some indication that on shore along the path going towards the
oppidum men spent some time in the hills in the many caves. Goats,it seems, have been around since the Greeks arrived.
When my father pulled up the first potsherds he thought them roman
because they were of red clay. He was doing a small map of the area and
he titled it Fontaine des Romains. After talking to Benoit, he crossed
Romains and wrote Grecs. If we accept LF Gantes timetable of -50 to +50
technically it should be roman.
I should have said it is massaliote, or massaliète. I am not sure
why there is a new adjective. But the Greeks being who they were, could
colonize a spot and remain greeks for 600 years. They were speaking
greek in Massalia, and the wealthy Romans would eventually send their
kids to the university there. The government was typically greek, the
gods were Apollo and Artemis , their pottery was a copy of ionian
amphorae, they even sent money to Delphi and had a small temple built
there, just like any other greek island or city-state
Massalia was an ally of Rome during the Punic wars, but being conservative they
later picked
Pompée's side and Caesar won. So he besieged the town with the help of
Arles, which furnished boats in record time, and won for itself the
right to be roman town with all the privileges attached. It is said that
Caesar did not sack the town because it had been an ally in the past. There
is an interesting legend .. as he ordered his troop to cut down trees
for the siege in a centenial forest nearby, the soldiers impressed by
the stately trees, and the sacred ambiance were reluctant to offend the
gods, so Caesar himself seizing an ax, knocked down a tree and said that
the wrath of the Gods could fall upon him alone. This was in -49 , and
as he went on to conquer Gaul, Massalia was bypassed because of its
location but also because the Romans would build new towns as in Acquae
Sextius =Aix en Provence, where there were hot springs and a new harbor in
Frejus settled by the veterans of the VIII legion.
How long did it
take the Massaliotes to start speaking latin? There was around 1900 a
migration of Genoese coral fishermen, followed by people from the south
of Italy. In Les Goudes one of the most colorful persons is
undoubtedly Irène Regio. 88 years old , she still can converse in
Italian whenever she gets a chance, so I believe the Tuna fishermen of
Riou still considered themselves greek. And since the amphora collar I
retrieved in Fontagne is dated by LF Gantes -500 I think the name is
appropriate. The water holes on the island , Well of the Goats where I
found an etruscan bit, or Fountain of the Greeks look so much like a
water hole I saw in Delos that I am totally convinced to stay with
the name.
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Delos |
Riou: Puits des Chèvres |
| Vigie de Masselhaveyra | Vigie de Notre Dame de la Guardia |
Watch Tower or Farotium ?
In the Roman times, Maïre was known as Immadras
Positio by Strabon, because when you approach Massalia coming from Italy
the island looks like a cape. It was thought that there was a pharos on
the island. The most famous pharos is the one of Alexandria, one of the
seventh wonders of the world.
A farossium is a fire lit on top of a height to communicate with another
watch post. Alexandria sported a 3 story- building.
LF Gantès and his colleagues have found
bricks identical to some found in Greek Massalia at the base of one
of the peaks, occupied now by a construction dating from the 2nd
World war. The clay is clear with the caracterictic mica inclusions used
by the Massaliètes for about 700 years
Later...
In 1264 the town paid watch-men on the island of Maïre and Riou,
in 1295 the accounting reports paying watchmen on Riou and in 1302 the
men stationed on Riou communicated with Marsilhoveyra using a farossium
or farotium
In the 13 century there were outposts along the southern shore of France
from L'Espiguette in the Rhone delta all the way to La Turbie which is a
monument to the glory of Augustus in the hills of Monaco, and Robert le
Sage, Count of Provence sent one of his men, Robert de Millet, to make a
study of the defenses of the coast in 1326. Where there were fortified
towns they forced the outside houses to be destroyed , repairs to be
made to the walls, and towers erected in several locations. The towers
were round, with 1 meter thick wall , about 4 m in diameter . when
possible there was a cistern, a room built above, and a roof platform to
light the farotium. One of them built in 1352 on Cap de Cessiech was hit
by lightning and rebuilt in 1589. The room is missing and the cistern
because the guards were friars and they built a chapel near it. The
ladder was all important, and we shall see that it was an expense for
Riou also.
Farossium of Cap de Cecciech 1352 rebuilt 1589
The first mention of Farossium in loco de Masselhaveyra is in 1302. It is the watch tower which faces Riou on top of the massif de Marseilleveyre at 432m . The British destroyed it in 1814 . They had taken the place of the Saracenes .
There were 2 guards who got communications from the 3 men on Riou , passed it on to the 2 at theTurris de Gardia above Marseille , who then relaid messages to the town. We know some of the names :
Pons de Servieres, Pierre Alfant paid 4 florins 2 gros for the month of March 1408
Louis Negrel, his son and Pierre Vailhe remplace the 2 guards killed in May 1527 or taken as slaves, and are paid 5 florins per month.
View of Riou from the summit of Marseilleveyre more than 3 kms away
Limited view of Jarre by cloudy weather
Glorious view of the hill of Notre Dame de la Garde which
hides the old town of Massalia , so this spot is not the place from
where you see Marseille (Marsilhoveyre in dialect), but rather the
place where the old Marseille was at the time the Greeks arrived. Massalia Veterem
the oppidum of the "Ligures "
This look out was temporarily closed in 1696, and the town
paid 140 pounds to François Puget the son of Pierre Puget the famous
sculptor, for the wood needed for the farot for 2 prior years.
It was closed definitely by the British in 1814.
In the 1900s the Club Alpin transformed the ruins by adding a second
story, and made them into a refuge just as they did with another
look-out at the Cap Gros.
The location of the farot is probably where a cross was erected first in
1900, to be thrown down by a storm, and rebuilt.
Farotium site?
Behind the ruin the islands of Riou and Plane
Only flames and smoke could actually be seen at such
distances, but they must have taken quite a toll on the rare vegetation.
Forefront left the ruins of MarseilleVeyre
look-out. In the background the red arrow points to the Refuge du Cap
Gros, another look-out station already in ruins on 1904 maps.
In 1859, an archivist of Marseille, Bouillon-Landais, compiled a small
document from the archives he was checking and he tells us most that we
know about the island. That it started as a farot in 1295, and stopped
operating in 1695.
It seems that there was before a
chain of manned outposts along the shores, but after the roman empire
collapsed the whole place was up for grab, and it was not until Louis XI
that there even was an attempt to organize the country . Even when they
were the brothers of the king of France or maybe because of that, the counts of Provence were
caught in a political maëlstrom which involved Sicily, Naples,
Rome, Savoy, Aragon , sometime allies, sometimes foes. This was the
excuse for attacking and pirating and enslaving by everybody and
anybody!
On the recommendation of Jean Courtin, I met this year with one of his
colleagues Henri Ribot who lives not too far from Port d'Alon, in the
quaint harbor of Sanary. I was treated to an oustanding history lecture on
our first meeting. I must admit that history and in particular the
Middle Ages has never been my strong point, so I am hoping to have more
information coming soon.
Until now the source about Riou was Bouillon-Landais , who published a
drawing by Ferdinand Famin of the ruin in 1858
Knowing that the diameter of the tower is 4m my father deducted that in
1858 the ruin was still 6 meters high or 18 feet.
The V on the right is still pretty much the same as today, it is the door to the
room where the guards originally would sleep. There is a half-circle
opening made of bricks which are now scattered on the ground or below
the tower, but the slit in the wall which today is still there is
missing on the drawing. This depends on the location of the painter or
photographer.
B-L finds the construction carefully constructed with a lot of care.
Today Philippe Rigaud (Des Iles Côte à Côte) finds it irregular and the
mortar of mediocre quality.
I have a 100 year old house in Les Goudes where the mortar has become
dust, so I think this wall standing since 1300 was well built.
Degradation has been stopped , as it has been at the fort of Morgiou by
someone who sealed the ruin.
B-L sees a cistern in the north , dug in the rock, with a stone vault
covered with pouzzolane concrete.
PR sees it to the west, filled with stones.
I see it to the west, which makes me think that BL did not have a
compass for he also places to the East, the 1442 cabin which is full north.
He is 90° out. As it is stuffed with rocks and tiles it is difficult to
see pouzzolane or a cistern even less to see it dug in the rock. In my
opinion there is NO rock there and the vault was built to support the 1m
tower wall which otherwise would have been built over a void.
Chaumelin, a journalist who wrote about the island in the daily
newspaper in 1858 , believes it is an oven!!
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The tower as seen by F. Famin |
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Cistern ? Oven? |
In 1442 the town pays for a cabin ..rather small for 3 guys! |
The archives differ also about the houses. I believe it was referring to
constructions for all the Vigies. It mentions " houses with cisterns"
being built, 4x4x3
BL sees one ruin.
PR sees 3. A rocky bar with a flat area where some haphazard blocks does
not constitute a cabin. more an outdoor eating area if one judges by the
artifacts.
Somehow this construction ordered in 1442 gets a frame in 1451 18
falquetas 4 traversas and 100 nails (C agus).
In 1480 new repair 1 florin 7 gros for 12 planks of good wood and
100 nails.
Among the other expenses there is a boat in 1522, then in 1528.
There is a ladder "to get to the top" in 1484. There is a tree or
mast in 1384 delivered to the island by Antoine Raymond for 10 gros
in 1475, again in 1480 there is one taken to the Vigie by 4 men
for 8 gros.
"Les gardes faisaient du feu tous les jours" The guards were lighting a fire everyday
Apparently if they did not light a fire they could not prove they
were at their post , and risked a fine up to one month salary!
But it must have been tough on the vegetation, unless they used it
also for cooking.
Integrated cistern at the base of the tower?
It is difficult to follow Bouillon Landais
about the cistern. It is vaulted but it looks more like a support of the
wall of the tower at a place where there is a void in the rock.
More likely the Cistern of the Pic Occidental and the tower were built at the
same time . Use of similar bricks and roof tiles in both constructions,
and the artifacts from the area around the Pic have been estimated by
Mrs Vallauri from the 14th and 15th century
On the way down there is the Pic Occidental Cistern. The vault is gone , made out
of bricks similar to the ones which made up the window in the tower. One
can see the ledge built to direct the water running down the face of the
rock to the cistern
THE GUARDS OF THE VIGIE OF RIOU
Dominique Stornel, Monnet Gilhan, Louis André paid 5 gold florins each for the month of 1408
Hélion Castel, Petit-Jean Baissanet,
Antoine Beaume are stuck on the island during the
siege of Marseille by the Connétable de Bourbon during 40 days
from the
19th of August 1524. The others posts are empty. They are paid 4 1/2
florins.
These men are the probable victims of the attack of May 1527
Johan Painblanc, Baptistin Armelli, Honorat... in 1577 receive 24 florins for taking falcons chicks from the nest.
Nicolas et Louis Tarrus, father and son are the last guards during July, August and September 1695 for a pay of 45 livres.
Bouillon Landais realized that related in a sort of footnote he was reading the story of the murder or kidnapping of the 3 men on Riou and the 2 on MarseilleVeyre. In 1527 the guards were attacked, and when a boat was sent to the island to investigate, the boat was "lost" with its occupants. The blame was put on the Turks . They were the allies of François I earlier, but it is now thought that they used the time of alliance to spy and make maps of the coast. We should also note that 3 years earlier it was the Aragonese who were attacking Marseille . The blame was also put on saracenes . The Arabs settled in Spain had pushed all the way north to Poitiers in the 8th century. Charlemagne battled them losing his nephew Roland in the Pyrenées pass of Roncevaux. Their incursions on rapid vessels called "fustes" went on . They would bring the sails down and sneak in, kidnapping and enslaving isolated individuals.
My father having restored the cistern in Fontagne was looking for the spring. A few feet away and higher was a slab of rock. He decided to investigate the base and was digging away when he realized he was coming across some human foot bones. He unearthed a skeleton laying along the slab, his arms crossed over his chest, about 1 1/2 feet down. He brought Mr. Charles from the Anthropology museum of Paris, who declared it to be a male 35 years of age , about 400 to 600 years old and a macedonian. Since the Turks had attacked and killed the guards in 1527, and the man was missing the right leg under the knee, we concocted a story whereby this man had been wounded , caught the gangrene, was amputated (there was no peg leg) . We nicknamed him the Turk
His teeth were worn out, he had cavities in his wisdom
teeth, he was prognathous, his nose was bend to the left, and he had
scoliosis. He was 1.77 m which is rather tall for the time.
My father knew that, from the Vigie the guards could not see the cove of
Fontagne, and the saracenes whose ships were seen quite often in
the area at the time could hide there. He also concluded that the
Fons must have disappeared in the middle ages, filled by the
desintegrating rocks , for sailors would not
have risked contaminating a water hole by burying one of their men right
above it.
From the watch tower of Riou , guards could not
see if the Saracenes were in Fontagne
During the summer of 2004, there was an "sensation" article in a local paper
about a book written about St Exupery, the famed author of the Little
Prince. Was he the man buried on the island of Riou? They were pointing
at the wrong place of burial, they were saying Escalon de Fonton had
identified him. They had this story about a couple of Italian fishermen and a kid living on
the island during the war who had found a body floating with a parachute
in 1944 , and the kid had told the story , but never wanted to talk
about it again, and now he was dead. I thought about calling the paper, and
dismissed it as a story written during the summer for
entertainment.
I had stored the Turk next to a gorilla cranium my grandfather Guy
Maxime Albert had
brought back from Senegal when he was a doctor on ships going to Brazil.
I had used them for comparative anatomy for my kids and grand-kids. One
day the youngest one, Giorgio came in and asked to see "the Man",
then softly inquired if this was his grandfather!! His older
brother Roberto had made up a story to scare him. Now the newspapers were doing
the same!
St Ex had already made the news when Jean-Claude Bianco a fisherman from
Sormiou had retrieved in his nets a silver bracelet inscribed with the
name Antoine de St Exupery, New York. I had read the Memoirs of
the Rose , the Memoirs of his wife Consuelo, and so I knew that he,
indeed, was living in the USA before joining the war. So when the
fisherman was
attacked by the family as a fraud, it was obvious to me he could not be, because what
local fisherman would be knowledgeable enough to make a fake "gourmette"
with an american address? It had to be real. This spurred the
owner of the Comex to launch a search for the plane in that area and
eventually they did find it near the Conclus. The fact that the
bracelet had been at the bottom of the sea also meant that the body had
not been buried on the island unless the hand had been separated during
the crash, and hence would have been missing from the skeleton.
In 1944 St.
Exupery had joined the fight and was stationed in Corsica. He was flying a
P 38 or rather an F5B Lightning,
unarmed to take pictures of German installations. It is thought that having
taken some incredible pictures of Genoa defense installations, he had decided for his swan song
to go over Marseille and Toulon and do the same. He is said to have passed out on the runway
on take off the day before, so he was told this would be his last trip.
One can get more technical details on Luc Vanrell's website
www.Immadras.com and
Philippe Castellano's
www.aero-relic.org
In 2006 I met Helene Desvals who is making a video of vulgarisation about Les Calanques.
She thought I should contact Luc Vanrell, who had commented that my dad
had kept careful notes about his find.
I thought he was a professional
diver living most of the time in MarseilleVeyre, a beautiful spot on the
shore accross from Riou but marred by the stench from the sanitation
plant pouring out nearby.
We finally met in september 2006 at a gathering in the hills to
listen to a historian talk about the farots which is french for
farotium. With a couple of friends Luc had been investigating
plane wrecks, and found the serial number of St Exupéry's plane on a
piece of metal. They also discovered there were 2 planes, and by
identifying the motor they came to the conclusion they had not only a
P38 , but also a german plane, a Messerschmit 109. More research into the archives led them
to 2 german planes being shot down in that area in 1943. One of the
pilots was prognathous . Unfortunately for Luc, his contact, the kid
who had been on the island and saw the floating body, now a man, would not discuss
it any further , maybe because he had been sworn to secrecy by the
couple. He did mention a foreign uniform.
At first I had been annoyed. After meeting Luc and appreciating the
amount of work he and his friends had put in this detective work I was more
sympathetic but I still disagreed with his conclusion.
The man would have been buried naked, because my dad had found it
not even 20 years after the presumed burial, and there was no trace of material
or buttons. Even if the couple had recuperated the parachute and the
clothes, would they bother to bury a nazi who had been starving them for
3 years, when it was so easy to push him back in the water to the fish?
and what about the leg missing? Even if it had been ripped by the crash
, the couple would not have taken his pants off with half a leg missing.
And what about the teeth.. If the german pilot had been prognathous and wearing
braces which brought about grinding of teeth, wouldn't his dentist have taken
care of the cavities in his wisdom teeth? And how could his teeth be so
worn out if he was only 22.
When the Germans invaded the south of France they built bunkers every three
feet. They kicked everybody but 4 persons out of Les Goudes, one of
them an old woman Mme Moulin to whom they gave some bones so she could
make some soup for herself! . It is
hard to believe that a couple could live on the island at that time .
It
would have been easier to survive but for the fact that if you started a
fire they would have seen you from their look-out posts, . They had to be
allowed by the germans to be there and maybe fish for them. Maybe the
fact that they were italians, helped in some sort of way. But then why
not turn the body over to the germans.. unless they had cleaned him of
valuables. I can only see that for the burial and the reluctance
of the kid to talk about the whole gruesome scene.
But what about if Charles was wrong in his identification , which
seemed more and more likely. So I gave
Luc a vertebra for his team to conduct analysis and try to determine
first if we were looking at a man 50 or 500 years old.
I came back to the US to take a course in forensic anthropology, and
while learning the sutures, I realized that the skull had a
particularity. There is above the nose the remnant of a suture which has
normally disappears in adults, a suture in the middle of the frontal
bone. The book went on to say, that the metopic suture is found in some
individuals today, not as a pathology, but as indication of a race.
After the outburst from Gantès I
had been wondering why Charles had identified the skeleton as a
macedonian.. maybe this was my answer, for my Turk has 2 frontal bones.
So I turned to Jean Courtin once again. He backed LF Gantes completely,
and told me that Charles had been a walking encyclopedia, but he had
invented a race "dolménique"
from the aegean
which had invaded the indigenous tribes in the neolithic times ,
when, says Courtin, there are no dolmen in the Aegean,... so Charles is dismissed
today.
I will get back to the archaeologists and their fakes ,
their muddying the water as there is more on Riou . However J. Courtin
noted that there are many instances of metopic sutures in the neolithic
algerians..
Sooo... not St-Exupéry, not a german prince, but maybe
the descendant of a neolithic algerian who could qualify as a saracene . So
until we got the results of analysis of the vertebra , as far as I was
concerned R. Charles had a lucky intuition! or maybe he did know
something. I was wishing..
March 2008:
We have the DNA now, which is not common in the judiciary police
database, but we have no C14 datation yet.
Still , the DNA should rule out (or not) the german pilot.
St Exupéry and the Young Prince
Riou and the 2 islands of
the small and big Conclus are a bit like the Bermuda triangle.. There
are 4 ship wrecks and 2 plane wrecks in about 10 acres. One of them is
Antoine de St Exupéry's F-B5 Lightning, from the fateful day of July
31, 1944. The plane fell after being shot down and settled in the same
area as the Messerchmidtt 109 of Prinz Alexis von Bentheim-Steinfurt.
Looking for the Lightning engines, Luc found himself in possession
of a Daimler-Benz v12 made by Skoda!
By one of the twists of fate to the left of the Big Conclu where the
first Roman ship wreck saw its cargo picked up by Captain Cousteau,
there also a ship had gone down 300 years later on top of another one,
which resulted in a massive misinterpretation of the artefacts being
pulled out of the sea.
March 2008: Luc Vanrell has written a book relating
his discovery of that plane, his search for the pilots, his conclusions.
Along the way Luc and his friend Lino have found the german pilot who shot down the author of the Little
Prince .
After studying the pictures and the teeth, after getting the DNA of the
vertebra, he has come to the conclusion that St Ex was not buried in
Fontagne.
If we believe the experts of today the results of the DNA are, without a
doubt, a match between the man buried in Fontagne and his brother
Christian von Bentheim, who came last year to put a wreath and a ribbon with the coat
of arms of his family at the spot Luc Vanrell indicated to him behind
the 2 Conclu islands.
Prinz Alexis Fürst von Bentheim was flying his
second combat mission with an instructor( the book says first, but I
think his logbook says 2nd) , in a pack of 30 planes going
against 100 B17 and 50 P38 on their way to bomb a submarine base in the
bay of Marseille, December 2, 1943.
He was shot down, and the bulkhead of his Messerschmidtt 109 would
have ripped his leg off at the knee, a common happening I am told,
in that plane, where the feet of the pilot were held to the pedals. The
reason they were told to eject was that the plane would sink right away! Dead
at the age of 22. His body floated and was retrieved by the couple
of fishermen living on the island. Raoul Amari who was 10, was living
with them, on Riou at the time, and he is the one who mentioned it to Luc
Vanrell after Luc discovered his first plane wreck in the Bay of
Marseille , a Junker 88.
Eight months later, Antoine de St Exupery on a reconnaissance
mission was shot down by Horst Rippert on July 31, 1944.
His plane flying at 3000 meters, went down and no one ejected. It went
down on the same spot as the Messerschmidtt.
Luc Vanrell's father (also a diver) had spotted the wreck, and when the
bracelet was retrieved, Luc who was diving at the Cosquer cave, went
during his week-ends off to dive 240 feet down to
check on "his " P38" wreck and try to find the engine. The landing
gear was enough to convince him he had the right sort of plane, later
someone found the serial number from Lockeed 2374 L which left no doubt
as to the identity of the pilot. This is when Luc started to look seriously
into information about the skeleton my father had found, hoping it was St
Ex.
By the time we met, he also had discovered the engine was not a P38
engine but a Messerschmidtt F-2 engine, which had been crashed, rebuilt
as an F-4,
and stuffed in a Messerschmidtt 109 , the plane of young Alexis von
Bentheim shot in december 1943.
As we looked at the pictures , we could tell that the skull did not show any damage (St Ex had a very bad crash in South
America which left him in a coma) and was prognathous. For Luc, it had to be the german
pilot. He and his friend Lino von Gartzen tracked down not only
Christian von Bentheim, but also the 5 german pilots who could have shot
down St Exupery. Together they bring an end to the mystery surrounding
the disappearance of St Exupery , and a closure for the Bentheim family,
who did not really know either what had happened to young Alexis. A
young prince whose destiny was very different from the Little Prince's
of St Exupery.
Jean Courtin who worked with Luc
Vanrell at Cosquer Cave told me: "He will amaze you"
This is an understatement.
What a story.. Thank you Luc.. Tell me more!
He had a small company called la Vigie du Commerce, located 2 rue de la
Republique and in the building top right of the picture, behind the
drawn bridge. He would called the Messageries Maritimes or the Cie
Paquet after sighting their ships arriving in the Bay , which gave them
time to prepare for unloading merchandises. According to his daughter,
his clientele also included the hotels and nights-clubs, and the people
who made a living carrying stuff from the ships to the docks.
Radio and the ship pilots house on the island of Frioul knocked down
the little company.
At his death in 1962 the lease was not renewed .
The view from the location of the Vigie is almost as oustanding as the following pictures taken from the crown of the gold-leafed statue of Notre Dame de la Garde. However , in Massaliote times , one can see the difficulty in spotting any kind of signal unless it is a fire.
View from the crown of Notre Dame de la Garde of the massif de
MarseilleVeyre with Maïre to the right
Cliché Luc Vanrell (Extreme
Photography)
View between the spikes of the crown of Notre Dame de la Garde of
Massalia, the old town being the triangular promontory behind the rectangular Old
Harbor.
Cliché Luc Vanrell (Extreme
Photography)
A Few Artifacts
This beautiful specimen of a 16th century pisan bowl is the type the
guards on Riou were using as dinnerware at the watch tower site (Drassm
depot du Fort St Jean)
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The green pitchers of the Citerne du Pic Occidental
These pictures are a help to understand
what the artifacts once looked like !
In " Promenades artistiques" de Marius Chaumelin
which were published in a daily newspaper in 1850 , he gives some precious informations
about the state of the island. There were wild goats and the foreman for
the exploitation of the Sablière who lived in a cabin which was "not
there 3 years before", was mad because the goats were devouring his
vegetable garden. So he organized a kill by inviting some poachers and
dogs. 8 goats jumped from the pass and ended alive in the sea where a
fisherman picked them up. Then there remained a multitude of rabbits
which could be pulled out of their holes by the ears, and grey lizards
under every leaf!
Chaumelin goes hill climbing in the southern part and gets rescued by
one of 4 or 5 workers employed in the sand pit. The 15th of August being
the feast of the Virgin, the man had come to the top of the island to
put a crown of wild flowers on a cross near the watch tower, which he
shows to Chaumelin and calls it "The Tower of the Saracene, more ancient
than Christ"
T
he Small Sablière without its sand
Industry has ravaged the area of the Calanques since 1825 . In the small village of Les Goudes painted in 1900, there is a lime factory, a sulfur factory, a lead factory, and a customs building on the left. Also the 4 bars which still exist.
Le Port des Goudes by Alphonse Moutte
There were also a lead factory, a chemical factory in Callelongue, another
lead factory at Samena. The rubbish from the furnaces have been piled every
where, and used for the road, the parking.
The building is a gun post already mentioned on 1694 maps when Vauban
developped the defenses for King Louis XIV
Détail du tableau d'Olive (mort en 1936) "Maïre" Musée Ziem, Martigues
The Army which was the owner of the island looked into establishing a watchpost on the island at the end of the 19th century but eventually did nothing and leased
the spot where the workmen of the Sabliere had built their shack to Mr. Tronc with the right to hunt and fish on the whole island. With a couple of friends he built a house, stairs, and hired a guard. Pipo Meïni was that guard. He built a small building on the other end of the island from where he could fish. He had a winch in Fontagne to pull his little boat up on the pebbles when the weather was too rough.
Pipo's fishing cabin at the point of Calamassana on
the east part of Riou
His sister joined him with his grand niece, and they lived 10 years on the
island. Alphonsine Meïni went on to marry Jacques Agrifoglio and their
descendants still live in Les Goudes.
The Navy inherited the island from the army, and renewed the lease to the
widow Tronc, until some time after the first world war.
I have been told how lucky I was to have spent so much time on Riou when
I was a kid. Nonsense! A trip to Riou was rare after the war. But it was
an enchanted place probably for that reason. The luck was to have a
quintessential *cabanon in Les Goudes and to spend summers there.
My grandfather loved fishing and he bought his place in 1921. Every
sunday he fell out of bed around 5:00 AM to indulge in a ritual with his
pals which would go on until noon. The local artist "immortalized" him
with the oars while in the background other people play at the other
typical Marseillais past-time, the bowling game of La Pétanque. Of
course by doing so he not only had a subject for his painting but also a
buyer!
However, people seldom play that bowling game in the morning, while
fishing is an early morning occupation, so
it is a posed painting!
The luck was to be there after the war when the region had not been
"discovered" and was still difficult to access, and Les Goudes was what
Lucien Blanchard describes as "populo".
*Cabanon: at the beginning of the 20th century, a fishing or vacation shack in the region of Marseille,
without water, light or any amenities.
La
Rue du Louvre by the painter Rosello around 1950
Le père André with a harpoon, le père Robert with the oars, le père
Rimbaud with the net
Les Goudes: a poem, a stink , a grating noise, a
quality of light, the end of the road and
its tramps, rusting steel, no one has described it better than John
Steinbeck in Cannery Row.
I discovered him in 1960 and when I got to Monterey in 1966 it was still the american
counterpart of Les Goudes, with still some empty lots, and
rusty canneries. Peter Revson could not understand my delight at being
there. Luckily my English was still poor enough , I did not have to
explain to the nephew of the Revlon boss why Steinbeck is for me the
best american writer .
In Les Goudes there are no canneries, the fish is not that plentiful.
But the Romans had something of the sort on the island with the tuna.
What we had was smuggling
Chaumelin, mentionned before, was not only a journalist, he was also a
custom employee. There was a custom building in Morgiou, Sormiou, Les
Goudes, there is a custom path which follows the shoreline. In many
places around a big city like Marseille on the major roads leading in
and out of the city there were check points called octroi where one had
to pay taxes on any product taken to the market. There was one at the
entrance of la Madrague de Montredon on the road coming from Les Goudes
which was also used by the Germans to prevent people from going there. But a determined hiker could find
a hundred paths to avoid these places, so Les Calanques are like a trait
selected for by natural selection to develop smuggling.
At the end of of the first empire, the British were encouraging this,
and Chaumelin said that they actually went up to the Vigie of
Marseilleveyre and destroyed it in 1814. I do not know yet what
the contreband was about, only that with the Continental Blocus declared
by Napoleon against the Britishn, smuggling spread.
After the II world war it was cigarettes under the control of the corsican mafia
, but also all kind of foodstuff which would be thrown overboard from
the ships passing by.
My father mentions that Pipo's house when in ruin in the 50s was
used by poachers and smugglers, so it was torned down.
But someone build something else a bit further, and a man appeared and moved in, who called himself the guard of the island, who could greet visitors naked, who "allowed" local fishermen to go hunting rabbits, as long as they gave him rabbits, fish, or gave his friends a ride to the party. He must have been reminded of what his duties were supposed to be, so he turned on his "friends". In July 1971 this building was blown up. In 1973 the maritime prefect did sign a paper and the man came to ask my father for the keys of his cabanon in Fontagne (the GEAR lease was over by then).
Today, The Vallon de l'Aiglon
But up-close and personal my enchanted site looks like this
The roof of the vivarium is gone which was the landing area, the water is beautiful as ever
The extraordinary red clay layer is still there through the
fossils of the urgonien limestone
but the stairs leading to the vivarium and the dock are almost gone
Under the tamarisks, the stairs going down to the beach. The witch
fingers planted by the Navy to hold the sand at the end of the 19th
century have been pulled out because they are not indigenous to the
island!
I miss their scent released by the sun, mixed to the perfume of
the sand lilies and the tamarisks . The top of the beach was green year
round , and now we have pebbles and the flowers of the dead instead.
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My father died the year the Cosquer Cave was revealed
to the public, in 1991. The region which fascinated him is unique, and
the only world underwater painted cave made it even more so, but
he did not know.
More than 30000 years ago , during a glaciation, the
sea level was very low , and Riou was not an island. One could walk
from Riou , past the Conclu all the way to the Massif de Puget. During
the following global warming, the ice melted and the sea level went up
360 feet and created the islands and the coves called Les Calanques, but
it also sealed the entrance of a cave located now about 110 feet under
the surface. The miracle is that the cave itself is located almost above
the sea level. and that someone found it
In the 80s, a diver from Cassis, Henri Cosquer,
exploring a long ascending tunnel discovered the cave which now bears
his name. During his subsequent solo visits to his secret garden, he had a frightening
experience when his lamp went off, then eventually he went back , with
friends and one of them discovered a hand
print, and he reported his discovery .
Jean Courtin was the director of the
CNRS, expert in neolithic, and an experienced diver. With his
friend Jean Clottes, in the eye of a storm of polemics, he set out
to explore what turned out to be a cave painted by Cromagnon men 27,000
years ago, and again 18,000 years ago. Their second book,
Cosquer
redecouvert, came out in 2006. It is the Cosquer encyclopedia . Jean
Clottes had to become a certified diver in his 70's and the gruelling
job of studying the cave with them was orchestrated by Luc Vanrell, who specializes in extreme
photography and extreme jobs.
Luc Vanrell, Jean Courtin,
Jean Clottes under some of the hands painted on drapery stalactites.
The limestone is so porous and cracked that there is no problem
with breathing. In some places it is only 15 feet thick
Jean Clottes and Jean Courtin do appreciate how lucky they are in front
of the panel of horses.
Cosquer being close to the water, it is quite different from Lascaux or Chauvet . Next to the usual bison, and deer, there are penguins, jelly fish and sea lions. And the cave in itself is as beautiful as it is rare.
Penguins of Provence (Photo
Luc Vanrell)
HISTORY
Historic Dates and
Archaeologic Sites of the Calanques and the Islands. In
yellow artifacts.
Dates from "Les Iles Côte à Côte" and Bouillon-Landais "L'Ile de Riou"
| -5600 | Ancient Cardial : sea level at -30m Entrance of the Cosquer cave already submerged. | Sablière | |
| -700 -500 |
Etruscan and Greek | Calemassane:Massaliete Puits des Chèvres:Etrusque Massaliete,Italique Sablière: Etrusque et Attique Fontagne: Mass |
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| -49 | Siege of Marseille by Julius Caesar. |
