Een man met wind in zijn zolen

"An odd fellow, there is no other word. This teenager in his sixties has wind in his soles." That is how Pourquoi Pas ? introduced Jean Mahy in September 1979, on the eve of his first RTBF broadcasts. For years he had been walking the country's thirty thousand square kilometres, discovering everything others had passed by without seeing.

An archaeologist and art historian by training, he was as interested in geography as in archaeology, if not more: the shape of a valley, the weave of a village, a sandstone wall around a graveyard, the strange graft on a tree. He was proud to be the nephew of Abbé Mahy, co-author of a "Geography of Belgium and the Congo" that made generations of schoolchildren sweat.

The journalist saw in him "something of Schliemann and Burckhardt, but also of Jules Verne and a little of Tintin". Bohemian and meticulous at once, he rose around six in the morning and devoted two hours to his routes before anything else. He had been doing so for more than twenty years when television came looking for him.

Bronnen:Pourquoi Pas ?, 6 septembre 1979 - P. C.