The Cistercians [antikvár]

Introduction ountains abbey, in North Yorkshire, attracts more visitors in J a year than any other monument in England except the Tower of ' London. The Abbey of Las Huelgas, outside Burgos, is visited by more people daily than the city's cathedral, one of the glories of Spanish Gothic architecture. The Abbey of Fontenay, in Burgundy, is one of the few monuments in France to have been accorded the status of World Heritage Site by unesco. When it was decided to make a film of Umberto Eco's best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, a story about a Franciscan sleuth set in a Benedictine monastery, the film makers had no hesitation in choosing the Abbey of Eberbach, on the Rhine, as the perfect location. The Italian radio progranmie for lorry drivers, 'Mondo Camion', strongly urged its listeners to visit the Abbeys of Fossanova and Casamari as soon as they could afford to take a little time off work for sightseeing, describing the two abbeys as oases of calm after the stress of driving a juggernaut for long hours on the motorway. These six abbeys have two things in common: they all manifestly exercise some form of magnetic attraction on a considerable proportion of the European public 'at leisure', and they are all Cistercian. Professor Braunfels, in his classic work Monasteries of Western Europe, chooses an illustration of the cloister of Fontenay as his frontispiece, and opens Chapter i with these words: 'Whoever sets foot in some peaceful haven ofthe Cistercians, whoever comes upon a scene of ruins in the snow, a church choir forgotten in the woods, is moved by them. Solemnity, calm and dignity speak from these stones'. At many Cistercian sites today, the little kiosk where you buy your ticket, not unlike a cinema box-office, and the waste-paper baskets and well-meaning signposts or, where the ruins have not been taken into care, the cars parked right up against the crumbling walls and all the trappings of Sunday outings, from the remains of picnics to candy-floss stalls, do little to sustain the feeling of awe described by Braunfels. And yet despite all this, these ruins still have the power to move even the most jaded contemporary sensibilities. opposite Buildwas, England. Nave