Proponents of the Anatolian hypothesis and the Kurgan hypothesis still debate. The first claim that the first common homeland of Indo-European peoples was in Anatolia, the latter postulates that the original homeland was in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea. If nothing allows to accredit the existence of such a unique homeland and therefore one or the other of these assumptions, the prehistoric origin of Indo-European languages ​​is probably the same from Iceland to Sri Lanka.

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Yesterday's and today's migrations have marked our planet and more particularly its East-West axis. Among the symbols of these displacements, the Silk Road is certainly the most fascinating. If the expression singular dates from the nineteenth century, it reflects a plural reality. Network of land and sea roads, they stretched from Europe to China, through the Near and Middle East, bypassing these great obstacles that are the Caspian Sea, the Himalayan plateau and the Taklamakan desert. So many crossroads and caravanserais where exchanges were philosophical, spiritual, cultural and material.

 

The Silk Roads were not only borrowed by merchants, diplomats and explorers. Like the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck (c.1220-c.1293), missionaries and pilgrims undertook the same travels to proselytize. All these religions have been modeled, infusing in particularities and vernacular traditions, until our days. If there are no Manicheans or Nestorians left, cultural identities oasis remain from Turkey to China and not only through their ruins and artifacts. They are the witnesses of this diversity and spiritual wealth of yesteryear.

 

Choosing the prism of ethnological observation and photography, this exhibition highlights the men and women met by Nabila Laajail and Fred Daudon from Istanbul to Xi'an. Their confessions and their testimonies come together in the form of a mosaic, that of individuals, that of a multitude of self, now threatened by nationalist currents, authoritarianism, mass tourism and geopolitical interests.

"What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak."

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Georges santayana

The Life of Reason vol. 3, ch. 1 (1905)

THE THEATER

of the

sacred stones

High spiritual sanctum are visible along these roads, between millennial monasteries, mausoleums of holy men of Islam, through the Buddhist caves of Mogao near the oasis of Dunhuang in China. From the beginnings of Christianity in Ephesus, Turkey, to the expansion of Islam in Central Asia, there are many testimonies of the historical presence of religious communities.

 

Samarkand is a garden of azure and sacred stones. Timur saw his capital city as the eternal center of the universe. Today it has the air of amusement parks for tourists and locals. Open-air shops, the stalls of the artisans of the caravanserais of yesteryear gave way to more sanitized stores where rosaries, prayer rugs and other souvenirs are sold at the foot of mosques, until inside madrasas (Koranic schools) now abandoned.

 

Guided tours of the supposed tombs of the prophets Daniel, David and Job are on the agenda of many tour operators. Whirling dervishes (members of the Mevlevi Sufi movement) twirl in tourist shows. They thus participate to the "mevlanamania" around the tomb of the poet and mystic Sufi Rumi. A highly lucrative folklore.

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More than 5 million tourists visited Iran in 2017, including 3 million Shia pilgrims from Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf Arab States. The city of Mashad in Iran is a high place of pilgrimage. The tomb of Iman Reza is visited every year by more than 25 million pilgrims. The charity foundation Astan Qods Razavi, in charge of the management of donations would have an assumed value of $15 billion according to Abbas William Samii. If you want to be buried next to a holy man, you will pay up to $ 10,000 (according to our information). Expensive eternal rest.