Christmas is a
time where friends and family like to gather up around the fireplace and to tell
stories and tales.
So here are two nice Dordogne tales “made in Périgord” and about Périgord.
The
Saint-Médard harvestman
A rich and frugal woman had been given the right to harvest the field across from her home
as much as she could, but only in a period of 24 hours. She hired Médard, a renowned harvestman in
the Dordogne region, to accomplish this physical task.
However, from the early morning she brought his meal to the man in the
field, she found him to be slow and quite lazy, which infuriated her. Médard kept reassuring the woman the harvest
would be finished by night, “with God’s help”.
But the woman did not believe him and, to show her fury towards the man,
she refused to prepare his last meal that night. According to the tale, it started raining
very hard, a downpour in fact, that lasted six long weeks and destroyed the
harvest in the field. Today, the saying
goes: “when it rains on Saint Médard day (8 June), it will still rain forty
days later”.
The
legend of the truffle
A very old and
starved lady who was wandering around the Dordogne region was once rescued by a
very poor lumberjack who welcomed her in his home. To show how grateful she was for his kindness,
the old lady turned magically into a beautiful young wealthy lady and, using
her golden magic wand, transformed a potato into a “precious black apple”. Once the fairy disappeared like a spark
through the fireplace, the lumberjack found his garden to be full of these
unique-smelling and so sought-after “precious black apples”. But they weren’t apples. They made the man very rich as they were in
fact the famous truffles from Périgord also known as “black gold” because of
their high retail price. Such is the
Périgord truffles tale.
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