Every week, we invite you to read something new, a classic or a book to rediscover.
If he published a first novel in 2023, The friend of sunny daysSébastien de Courtois has previously written remarkable stories or essays such as A Praise of Travel (“In the footsteps of Arthur Rimbaud”), Tea in Istanbul Or Letters from the Bosphorus. His latest, Walking and the sacredpublished last spring, is one of those dense and luminous little books that you want to always have close to you, but also to give as a gift. As the title indicates, the author combines his appetite for walking with his interest in religion even if the “sacred” is not limited to this area alone. A specialist in Eastern Christians to whom he has devoted numerous works, his object of study and passion has taken him to Turkey (where he lived for ten years), Syria, Iraq, etc. Walking and the sacred also takes us to China, Ethiopia and Cyprus where he has now settled.
Sébastien de Courtois © Julien Falsimagne
For this citizen of the world, a child of the Tarn, the Cévennes and the Swiss Valais through his family origins, the sacred “ became obvious » one day in 1997 when entering the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul for the first time. This sacred dedicated to a transcendence that bursts with truth », he met him again when discovering Tur Abdin (“the mountain of the servants of God”) in the South-East of Turkey and in other places whose beauties and secrets he shares with friendly erudition.
Memory of places
“ I believe in the continuity of places and landscapes, I believe in the sustainability of this life which obliges us to hope in a world in decomposition, to the forest, to the lakes and to the plains, I finally believe in the return of the skies of broken summers and winters ”, writes this “ transmitter of history and culture, through walking and literature » attached to « register in the memory of the place “. His quest naturally led him to reports or books to give “ a voice to those who had lost everything; Christians, Yazidis, Shabaks, Mandaeans and other minorities of the Levant, believers and atheists, disbelievers, cheats and pirates “.
Celebrating the “ magic of the encounter », Sébastien de Courtois invites us to preserve our capacity for wonder in a violent and disenchanted world. In fact, his text is also a manifesto: “ that of the march towards the sacred “. Pass it on.
Christian Authier
> A book for the weekend
Walking and the sacred • Salvator editions
