グルネ周辺のアトラクション＆必見スポット - トップ20

アブレン＝サン＝ナゼール旧教会の遺跡は、第一次世界大戦の印象的で象徴的な遺物です。16世紀にジャック・ル・カロンによって華麗なゴシック様式で建てられたこの教会は、1915年の戦闘中にひどく損傷しました。この遺跡は、戦争の悲劇を記念するモニュメントとして保存されています。

A remarkable story about the Canadian trenches concerns the preparations for the attack on Vimy Ridge in April 1917. The Canadian divisions used an underground quarry and created additional corridors towards the front. These tunnels and trenches played a crucial role in the success of the attack, with the Canadians managing to retake the strategically important ridge in just three days.

A remarkable story about the ruins concerns the decision not to rebuild the church after the war. Although the church had been classified as a historical monument in 1908, the Commission for Historical Monuments decided that the ruins should remain as a testimony to the German destruction. Ironically, it was the French guns that had destroyed the church, but the ruins became a symbol of the war and the reconstruction.

The Nécropole nationale de Notre-Dame-de-Lorette is one of the largest and most impressive military cemeteries in France. Situated on a hill in Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, this cemetery contains the graves of more than 42,000 soldiers who died during the First World War. The cemetery was inaugurated in 1925 and includes a basilica, a tower-lantern and a museum.

The Vimy Memorial is the most prestigious Canadian monument in Europe. It is located on the very site of the 1917 fighting near Vimy in the Pas-de-Calais region of France. Erected on the highest point of the hill, Hill 145, the objective of the operations that began on April 9, 1917, it overlooks the Douai Plain. In 1921, architect and sculptor Walter S. Allward (1875-1955) won the competition from the Canadian Battlefield Memorials Commission. The significance of the battles at the site and the favorable location at the top of the hill allowed Vimy to receive the most prestigious work.

The church dedicated to the Mother of God under the title "Notre-Dame de Lorette" rises in brilliant white and is visible from far away. But the brilliant impression is deceptive, at the latest when the visitor to the site realizes that they are in a huge military cemetery. Around 20,000 individual graves and a further 23,000 victims of war and tyranny buried in ossuaries are deeply disturbing.

I went there late one evening, a calm that does you good, a great panorama night and day

Such places are still very important today as memorials to the countless war dead. "Now, Lord, you let your servant depart in peace, as you have said..." says the so-called "Hymn of Simeon" (Luke's Gospel, Chapter 2, Verse 29). However, the many people buried here did not depart in peace, but became victims of war and an inhuman tyranny. The most important and at the same time everlasting function of the military or honorary cemeteries or war graves is therefore to keep the memory of this suffering alive and - every generation anew (!) - to remind them of the need to maintain peace in the long term.