There was a time, some two hundred years ago, when an elaborate silk or fur-trimmed pelisse was all the fashion among the ladies of Geneva. But styles moved on and the pelisse, though nowadays never seen on the streets of the Swiss city, is recalled in the name of a road in the heart of the Old Town: the Rue de la Pélisserie. This is no grand boulevard. It is a narrow alley, one of those inviting byways which make Geneva’s vieille ville so very interesting. So of course we cut down through Rue de la Pélisserie on our impromptu morning wander through Geneva.
Words from the Sunday homily drift from the open upper windows of an elegant chapel as an unseen preacher quotes from Leviticus. The message is a simple one about the importance of treating foreigners as equals. In the quiet Sunday footfall in the alley below the chapel, there are two Arabic women, each wearing a black abaya decorated with fine threads of embroidery. We wander along behind the two women in black for a minute or two, pausing at a mural which recalls how citizens of Geneva gave shelter to Huguenot migrants. From there, it is but a few steps to the auditoire de Calvin, a chapel with austere lines where John Knox often preached. Geneva’s Scottish Presbyterians still meet here each Sunday morning and we slip inside for a few moments, instantly transported by a Scottish hymn to a place so far in spirit from Geneva. The auditorium is not merely the preserve of the Scots Kirk. It is also used each week for Dutch Reformed Church services and by an Italian Protestant group known as the Waldensians.
Faith and politics
Few other European cities can match Geneva when it comes to ethno-confessional variety. It’s a mix which goes well beyond a dozen shades of Calvinism. There is a neat Russian Orthodox church built on land donated by the city of Geneva in 1862. Still today, it acts as a focus for Russian faith and culture in the lakeshore city. The Russian church was one of a number of new places of worship that were sanctioned in the years after the removal of Geneva’s huge city bastions in the 1850s. The dismantling of the fortifications released a huge amount of empty land and Geneva’s Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican and Jewish communities were among the beneficiaries. The Beth-Yaacov synagogue was completed in 1859 to a design by a protestant Swiss architect. It remains a major city landmark today.
Radical liberalism is a Geneva quality which finds expression in the city’s support for a complex mosaic of faith communities.
Geneva has its église adventiste and a Coptic community (which celebrates the Divine Liturgy in a church once used by Roman Catholics). There are small Hindu and Buddhist temples. Just north of the city centre, the Saudi-funded Geneva mosque is one of several Islamic institutions in and around Geneva; the city’s citizens voted overwhelmingly against the ban on minarets in a 2009 referendum (though the proposal secured majority support in Switzerland as a whole). It is a good example of how Geneva is so often more tolerant than the rest of the country.
“This is a city which is so often misjudged,” says Cyrille Wohlschlag, a Geneva-based historian who is keen to emphasise that the Geneva story is more than merely Calvin. “The mur des réformateurs is a Geneva icon, but you’ll find modern Geneva offers more than just Calvinist history,” suggests Cyrille. “Look at the stats for this canton and you’ll see that Roman Catholics greatly outnumber Protestants,” he adds. “And, let’s face it, nowadays the Geneva area is very secular.”
Cyrille takes us on a fast walk through his adopted home city, pointing out the sights and sounds that make up his Geneva. “Just listen to that,” he says, as a tram rattles down the Rue de Carouge. “That’s the oldest tram line in the city.” We sense that this is a part of town where Cyrille feels very much at home. It’s a gritty Geneva, a part of town where the pelisse was surely never in fashion. This is the Geneva where the young Isabelle Eberhardt, already in her teens dressing in the style of a desert spahi, mingled with ease with migrants from Russia and North Africa. These are the back streets for love affairs and political intrigue: Eberhardt (probably with a copy of Pierre Loti’s Aziyadé to hand) seducing a handsome young Armenian diplomat called Rehid Bey while impoverished Russian intellectuals smoke strong cigarettes and plot a revolution.
It is these extraordinary juxtapositions which bring alive the streets of Geneva. Just a few steps from a bas-relief which symbolically celebrates Geneva’s historic role as a city of refuge, expensive jewellery shops display fabulous watches with five figure price tags.
“Now, see over there,” says Cyrille, pointing out a sushi bar. “That’s where Lenin would meet fellow socialists in the evenings.” It seems unlikely that Lenin and his comrades had a taste for sushi, but the establishment has changed hands many times over the years. When Lenin lived in Geneva, the café at the northern end of the Rue de Candolle was the Landolt, a rather down-at-heel café and bar run by two Hungarian brothers who were well trusted by Geneva’s Russian emigre community. Sushi has replaced sausages and sauerkraut and no longer do lifelong socialists make a pilgrimage to sit at table 40 by the window — that was Lenin’s favourite spot.
Cyrille recounts the tale of how the old wooden table on which Lenin had carved his name mysteriously disappeared during a refurbishment a few years ago. “I bet they have it tucked away in a cellar somewhere, and one day it’ll turn up in an auction,” says Cyrille who clearly has a good appreciation of capitalist economics. Indeed, Geneva’s socialist history is sometimes masked by a veneer of capitalism. Just a few doors down from the café where Lenin and his colleagues tussled over politics, the one-time home of Russian Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov now houses an asset management company. And sometimes Geneva’s political history has been lost in a tide of faith. The building where Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin attended the Geneva Congress of the First International is now a Roman Catholic church serving the Spanish-speaking community of the city.
It is these extraordinary juxtapositions which bring alive the streets of Geneva. Just a few steps from a bas-relief which symbolically celebrates Geneva’s historic role as a city of refuge, expensive jewellery shops display fabulous watches with five figure price tags. Do we imagine it, but does that recumbent figure in the bas-relief not look rather like Lenin? “Well, Lenin certainly came to Geneva as a refugee,” says Cyrille.
Past and present
The narrative of tolerance is a key element of the modern identity of Geneva, but such openmindedness has not forever been an element of the city. Antoinette Aeschlimann, a Geneva tour guide, is quick to remind visitors that the city authorities in Calvin’s day approached issues of morality, lifestyle and religion with all the zeal of the Taliban. “I’m not sure there was a lot of colour in everyday life in those days,” she says. In 1553, the Spanish theologian Miguel Serveto, who had challenged Calvin’s teaching, was burnt alive on a pyre of his own books. Two centuries after Calvin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw his own books set alight on the streets of Geneva, and was no doubt thankful that he himself was spared. It was a tough moment for the writer who is nowadays acknowledged as being one of the city’s most famous sons. When the chips are down, Genevans always remember that Rousseau was born and bred in their city. He often signed his books as ‘Jean- Jacques Rousseau, citoyen de Genève’. Calvin’s association with the city was much looser. He was born in distant Picardy (in northern France).
The four central figures in the monument to the Reformation in Geneva are William Farel, John Calvin, Theodore Beza, and John Knox (photo © hidden europe).
The city’s four most famous reformers stand centre stage in the monumental sculpture which recalls the Reformation. The mur des réformateurs leaves no doubt as to who are the star turns in the Geneva story: Farel, Calvin, Beza and Knox — none of them born in Geneva. But today they gaze out over a beautiful park, the perfect place for a Sunday afternoon stroll, which is much loved by all residents of the city. Arabic and Turkish women chat while their children play; a young lad stands below the figure of Calvin, looking up to the four giants of Geneva history; an elderly gentleman sits on a bench reading a Russian newspaper; while onlookers, men and women of all colours and creeds, gather around a large open-air chess board, eager to see if Alekhine’s gun — two rooks and a queen in file — will lead to a quick checkmate.
“But if you’ve time, there’s one more thing I’d like to show you,” says Cyrille, as he leads us on another fast hike across town to a cemetery which is noted as being the final resting place of John Calvin. Cyrille ignores Calvin and leads us past the grave of Jorge Luis Borges to a small plot in the corner, where a simple stone, with a cross shaped in the Orthodox manner, records the short life and premature death of Sophie, the daughter of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his wife Anna Grigoryevna. Sophie was baptized in Geneva’s Russian church in spring 1868 and died a few weeks later, aged just three months. “A victim of the chill winds that blow in off the lake,” says Cyrille. It is a sharp reminder that, even in the city of refuge, not all stories have happy endings.
