Sublime place. What exceptional work by these tailors. Always a pleasure to see them shape the new characters.
"It is a question of creating a "Breton Easter Island of the third millennium", a place honoring the collective memory of Brittany through the installation of large granite statues (from 2.5 to 7 meters in height on average) at the effigy of 1,000 Breton saints who founded a parish; around foundation myths have been grafted legends recounting the exploits of these characters.
Legend has it that Brittany venerates over 1,000 Breton saints but only 700 are listed because not all of them are "homologated", i.e. officially recognized by the Roman Catholic Church.
Philippe Abjean estimates "that there are about 800 saints recorded in Brittany, according to the most reserved historians; up to 1,500 for the most optimistic."
In fact, in the early days of the Church, all the faithful were called to holiness and until the 10th century, there was no centralized canonization procedure in the Roman Catholic Church to declare a person a saint. Thus, according to legend, the principal Breton "saints" are monks and members of the semi-monastic clergy emigrated from Great Britain, arriving in Armorica in the early years of the 6th century.
They are not saints in the current sense, but they bear this title because they are hundreds of religious leaders who came to supervise immigrants from across the Channel in the Armorican peninsula. "Their flock insisted on attaching the names of these monks to their living environment", hence a particularly eloquent hagiotoponymy (the Lan, Plou-reminiscent of places of worship and their associated relics) which conveys the popularity of these characters.
If written Breton hagiography aims to guarantee, through the Vitae of the most eminent "saints", the anteriority by the prerogatives of a bishopric or a religious establishment (these "saints" presented as related to the ruling families of emigration being integrated into a literature of propaganda and religious legitimization), the oral hagiography which concerns the majority of these local "saints", resorts more to the imagination and privileges the places (fountains, burials) as well as the objects sacred (hand bells, liturgical vestments) to communicate with the faithful.
If more than half of the saints have been forgotten, "nearly 400 still have a popular and very localized devotion... at the end of the Middle Ages there were more than 18,000 chapels or churches in the region, making Brittany the territory with the greatest density of sanctuaries".
The "Valley of the Saints", which should eventually include more than 1,000 statues of Breton saints, symbols of traditional Breton popular culture, aims, in addition to the artistic component, to restore the economy in Central Brittany, to be a global showcase for Breton granite and a tourist attraction.
In 2022, around 170 Breton saints have their statue in the Valley of the Saints."