While the Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday 10 October, Matthieu de Lamarzelle will complete a complete walking tour of the Mediterranean on Saturday 11 October 2014. For Peace. 13,000 kms to embrace the Mediterranean Sea. Steps to hold the worlds together and live in peace.
The Compostela Cordoba Association has set itself the goal of promoting understanding and living together among people of different cultures and traditions through reflection, encounters and walking towards symbolic places. In this spirit, Matthieu de Lamarzelle completes this Saturday, October 11, 2014 the complete tour, on foot, of the Mediterranean. At the age of 65, the long-distance pilgrim, a member of theCompostela-Cordoba Association crossed Syria in war, Libya in chaos, Algeria in insecurity, to return to square one. "The journey doesn't matter, it's an opportunity to be present, to take people's pulse, to pacify fear, testifies Matthew of Lamarzelle who is a Zen Buddhist monk. When you walk on foot, you have the impression that the world is very small, that everything is getting closer; in fact, everything becomes accessible".
Leaving on 18 June 2011, he first set sail for Alexandria where he arrived eight months later (4 February 2012), having crossed sixteen countries. "I did not choose Jerusalem as my horizon because it is not a place that breathes peace".
He entered war-torn Syria at the end of October 2011 and went to support Father Paolo Dall'Oglio, the Italian Jesuit founder of the monastery of Mar Mousa (north of Damascus) who was then threatened with expulsion. The spokesman of the Syrian revolution is now missing... Passing through Palestine and then Israel, Matthew de Lamarzelle was worried as he made his way up the Sinai by the police who questioned him for more than six hours.
Matthew resumed his loop of the Mediterranean on 16 September 2013 from Alexandria in the midst of the civil war. Curfews, tanks in the city, permanent controls... He himself suffers three attacks in two days. He decides to use small buses and local transport to avoid exposure.
When he entered Libya, tensions are incessant. "We don't know who's who, and the militia's everywhere."he says. It goes all the way back to Tunisia, through Kerouan. In Tunis, he is joined by his friend Jean François Duchosal, a former pilgrim from Jerusalem and a faithful disciple of Abbé Pierre who walked from Geneva (taking the boat to Naples). But they don't walk much as a duo, as only Matthew gets his visa to enter Algeria.
The journey in this country where Hervé Gourdel has just been murdered, is full of emotions: Annaba (Augustin's town), Sétif, the pass of the Djurdjura massif (in Kabylia) where Hervé Gourdel was captured, Tibhirine where Matthew found shelter. This passage in Algeria earned him a full page in the Algerian newspaper El Watan. Passing then on to Morocco, welcomed by their friend André Weill, vice-president of the Compostela Cordoba association and also a pilgrim from Jerusalem (from Drancy via Auchwitz), he returns to a more peaceful and peaceful path. to her sleeping in a tent, "impossible in Algeria, where 250,000 people have been killed in ten years of civil war (between 1983 and 1993)"..
The journey up through Spain leads them to Cordoba and Compostela, and to follow the Way of St. James that the Swiss Gabrielle Nanchen, co-founder of Compostela Cordoba, experienced as a possibility of reconciliation. "I discovered during my peregrinations that during the Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula Saint James the Apostle was called Matamore, the killer of Muslims... Europe has a thousand years of conflictual relations with Islam. If we perpetuate this conflict, our world will not have much longer".
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In this journey, Matthew de Lamarzelle measured the gap between media narratives and reality. "I was struck by the manipulation of the media, the falsification of information. "One day, channels such as France 24 or Al Jazeera mentioned the bombing of Qaryatayn, a Syrian village near the Mar Moussa Monastery where I lived. We phoned people we knew in the village. And they told us that everything was quiet! ».
"Under the pretext of a democratic challenge, we're breaking the infrastructure of these countries to get control of their resources." he thinks. I left to try to understand these countries, their people, to grasp their realities. We must not leave the suffering countries aside".
This pilgrimage for peace is a sign: ten Muslim countries, ten Christian countries and, of course, Israel were crossed. While the Nobel Peace Prize is announced this week among the candidates Edward Snowden (no to the dictatorship of data), Pope Francis and the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT) (promoter of democratic development in Tunisia), Matthieu de Lamarzelle completes with some relatives, the last stage of his tour on Saturday, October 11th, from the Lozère train station in Palaiseau (departure at 8:30 am). As always, he draws his energy from rhythm, concentration and openness to the unknown.
Practical details
Matthieu de Lamarzelle will arrive at the dojo at 175 rue de Tolbiac in the 14th arrondissement around 4:00 pm. He will be accompanied by his friends and family. He will exchange with the press from 6:00 p.m. onwards.
The association Compostela--Cordoba publishes on its website the chronicles of Matthew de Lamarzelle. The latter has dedicated part of his journey to the association. L'enfant@l'hôpital and more particularly to the 6th grade students of the Collège Oscar Roméro in Garges-lès Gonesse.
