Collégiale Notre-Dame de Semur-en-Auxois

What you will see

Enter through the 15th-century porch with its three doors and a 16th-century Virgin and Child on the central pillar. On the north side, the Porte des Bleds, named after the wheat fields it once faced, has a 13th-century tympanum telling the story of Saint Thomas. Inside, look up at the triforium of the choir, decorated with many carved heads of the people of 13th-century Semur. Along the north aisle, the drapers' chapel shows cloth being sheared, fulled, carded and woven, the butchers' chapel shows an ox being slaughtered, and the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre holds a painted late 15th-century Entombment beside the American window.

History

Tradition says that Duke Robert I of Burgundy founded a church here in the 11th century, to atone for the murder of his father-in-law, Dalmace of Semur. The priory belonged to the abbey of Flavigny. The present church was begun in 1225 and dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin, and its choir is said to face the sunrise of 15 August. In the 15th and 16th centuries gifts from the trade guilds paid for the chapels along the north aisle. The church became a collegiate church in 1739.

It was on the first list of historic monuments in 1840. Viollet-le-Duc restored it from 1845 to the mid-1850s, rebuilding the top of the spire and the roof timbers of the choir. Semur housed the headquarters of the American 78th Division from August 1918 to May 1919, and in 1927 the division's veterans gave the church a stained-glass window in memory of their dead. The organ, first built in 1584 and rebuilt in 1883, has been listed since 1987.