Talking Stones or the Path to the Roots of a Connected Europe – František Burda’s Adventurous Journey with His Family through France

In mid-August, my family and I set out on another adventurous journey. This time it led to France. We framed the entire concept of the journey within a framework that stood on two pillars. The first was historical definition. We went almost exclusively to centers that had long influenced and determined the cultural development of Europe in the eighth to twelfth centuries. The second pillar was the predominantly modernist sacral realizations of the founder of the functionalist approach to architecture, Le Courbusier. Although Le Courbusier declared himself an agnostic, his thinking about the functions of sacral space has a lot in common with the functional austerity and thinking about light or space of pre-Romanesque and especially Romanesque architecture. As is the rule on our travels, we also experienced incredible human encounters.