It was the weekend after his arrival in Matignon on January 9. Barely appointed head of government, Gabriel Attal, 34, sent his foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, to kyiv. A meeting was arranged between the latter and President Volodymyr Zelensky, who told him: “Do the French know that they have a Ukrainian prime minister?”
During the eight months he subsequently spent at the head of the government, Gabriel Attal never visited Ukraine, a sort of “domain reserved”, implicitly, for Emmanuel Macron. But for his first trip since his (sulky) departure from Matignon, it is this country that has been at the centre of international news since the Russian invasion that he has chosen as a destination as a guarantee of his newly regained freedom. While the Quai d’Orsay is still awaiting the appointment of its minister, Mr. Attal arrived in Kiev on Friday morning, 13 September, to meet Prime Minister Denys Chmyhal (and perhaps Volodymyr Zelensky), and to speak at the Yes Forum, visit… the annual diplomacy of the liberals of the Western world. He is also scheduled to head to the Black Sea on Saturday for a more personal getaway…
Like US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Gabriel Attal is the heir to a Ukrainian history that he wants to explore in Odessa with his mother, Marie (“Marika”) de Couriss, who is also curious to discover the family properties abandoned during the Russian Revolution. The world I went there, thanks to the two owners of the former family property and to Couriss’s Ukrainian biographer, excited by this mini political-genealogical “happening” and this return to the sources of French politics…
Gothic ogives and false minarets
First stop: a property in the village of Kourisovo, 50 kilometers north of Odessa. Rakes are busy in the aisles to give a clean sweep before the arrival of the “the youngest prime minister of France”, This is how Gabriel Attal is announced here; I’m not sure that everyone knows that he left Matignon. The cleaning ladies of a nearby secondary school were requisitioned to wash the fresco of the heroic Soviet workers at the entrance of the property, once confiscated by the Bolsheviks, like so many others belonging to the nobility. Before us, the incredible castle of Couriss, built around 1820 at the request of one of Gabriel Attal’s ancestors and mixing all styles, from Gothic arches to false minarets.
This ancestor, of Greek origin, was called Ivan Onufrievitch Kourisse (1762-1836). He was “enlisted among the Cossacks joined the regular army of the Tsars of General Alexander Suvorov to fight against the Turks” between 1787 and 1792, explains our wonderful guide, Viktor Mikhalchenko, 67 years old, a former engineer with a passion for local history. Decorated and ennobled after the battle of Izmail, a port on the Danube, Ivan Onufrievich Kourisse was rewarded with wheat lands around Odessa and began building a mansion there, transformed into a castle in 1892 by his grandson, Ivan Iraklievitch Kurisse. “He needed pieces and pieces for his collections of paintings, many of which are now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and ancient manuscripts.” – Gogol, Pushkin and even Voltaire and Gilbert Romme, the French “mountain” mathematician and inventor of the republican calendar.
You have 56.45% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
