For a South African living in Europe, (or is it for everyone else as well?) there is something magic about the village being turned into a scene from the Middle Ages - when, for a day, you are transported back into Medieval times. Bales of straw appear to cover the cobblestone streets, banners and flags and pennants are hung from balconies, cars disappear and horses are tethered to the heavy iron rings next to front doors - that were put there hundreds of years ago for exactly that purpose.
Men and women on stilts wander through the narrow streets, jugglers perform their antics for laughing children, fire eaters mesmerise with their dangerous skills, flower sellers call out as do the the bakers with his warm rolls and the rags and bones man with his cart of rattling wares as he trundles down the street. Over there is a woman sitting in the shade of a chestnut tree making a gossamer scrap of lace in the same way her great-great grandmother did it 200 years ago, and there, next to water pump, is a man bent over his carving of a waking stick with an elaborate deer head for the handle.
I hear drums and tambourines and aeolin pipes and go look for the source of the music. It is troupe from northern Siberia, dressed in layers of earth coloured fabric, bearded, woolly and wild-eyed, calling the crowds to come listen to their hauntingly beautiful music -- as if straight from the Siberian steppes and carried along by the frozen winds across the continent - and yet, eerily similar to the sounds of the local traditional Perigordine celtic music I have come to know and love so well.
A young boy takes the opportunity to demonstrate his skill with balancing sticks on the edge of the crowd and over there I notice a young woman bent over boiling cauldrons as she dyes her fabrics and home spun wool with beetroot and walnut leaves. On the other side of the crowd are two soldiers - their bulky bodies dressed in leather and chainmail, their metal helmets glinting in the sun - as they wait for the blacksmith to finish sharpening their heavy iron swords...
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