Familiarity Abroad: The Importance of Besançon, Charlottesville's Sister City

Kursaal concert hall, Besançon

Two weeks ago, the Alliance received a message from Edward Herring, a newly appointed member of the sister city commission in Charlottesville. Recently, on his last night visiting Besançon with a group of students from Monticello High School, Mr. Herring’s host family took him to hear Orff’s Camina Burana at the Kursaal, a concert hall in Besançon.

“Imagine this,” Herring recalls, “you are traveling… totally immersed in your activity. You are amidst a crowd of strangers, when suddenly, someone calls your name, someone unexpected.”

“As I squeezed my way from my seat… I heard someone say ‘Mister Herring, what are you doing here?’ Some of my recent students from a stint at Charlottesville High School had stopped in Besançon on their way to Geneva.”

Thousands of miles away from Charlottesville, Mr. Herring and his students had suddenly found a sense of familiarity within a foreign place. This sort of chance encounter is exactly the type of benefit to be gained from a sister city relationship.

A central street in Besançon

While French culture obviously seems foreign from an American perspective, it can feel reassuring to be a Charlottesville citizen in Besançon. Through years of cultural exchange, the sister city relationship has created a gateway through which citizens of both cities can experience a much deeper sense of intimacy than through tourism in a non-sister city. In Besançon, there’s a good chance you could find a French citizen who knows an acquaintance of yours from Charlottesville, and that’s a powerful feeling when you’re an ocean away from home.

City schools have helped initiate one of the most dynamic examples of this exchange. Both cities have actively maintained a series of student exchanges that have helped build cultural awareness and develop relationships across the two cities. I once witnessed a group of French students at a UVA football game in the fall with their Charlottesville High School counterparts. Later this spring, I saw a group of young Besançon students parading around UVA’s campus with their teachers, talking and giggling in French.

 

Price (left-center) and Eric (center) with friends in
Besançon

The sister city relationship has personally helped make Besançon a more familiar place for me. Three years ago, I hosted a student from Besançon named Eric over the summer. Eric and I are the same age and have a lot in common, including similar musical tastes and a goofy sense of humor. The next summer, while traveling Europe, I was welcomed by Eric and his family for a few days in Besançon. It was truly fantastic to see the city with a native who I already knew and trusted, someone who had seen my home as well.

Countryside in Franche-Comté

Another positive externality of the sister city program has been to expand the cultural exchange beyond the cities themselves and into the greater surrounding regions of Franche-Comté in France and the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. I am originally from Staunton, about forty-five minutes from Charlottesville. My alma mater, Robert E. Lee high school, has always sponsored a biennial trip for French and Spanish students to Maîche, a small town about an hour from Besançon. Additionally, students from Staunton and even Lexington have taken classes and taught English in Besançon in recent years. In this way, the curiously similar agrarian regions of France and Virginia have become intertwined.

Countryside in the Shenandoah Valley

At the end of his letter, Mr. Herring remarked that he could “barely wait to go back to Besançon and see whom else [he] will run into.” Indeed, with each passing year, citizens of the two cities have formed lasting bonds with the people and places, domestic and foreign, they’ve gotten to know through this relationship. For over twenty-five years, and hopefully for many more to come, Charlottesville and Besançon have helped foster these cross-cultural exchanges. For those hoping to broaden their experience with French culture, it is an absolute blessing.  


Written by Price Gillock, AFC intern