Église Notre-Dame de Saint-Père

What you will see

Look first at the 13th-century bell tower, 50 metres high, square for three storeys and octagonal at the top. The porch, from the early 14th century, hides the main door. Under it, a carved couple, a woman beside a man holding a model of a church, are thought to be the founders, and a woman's tomb is dated 1258. Above, the gable recalls that of the basilica of Vézelay. Inside, a pure and luminous nave leads to a choir ringed by five radiating chapels.

History

Saint-Père grew up around a monastery for women founded in about 858 by Count Girart de Roussillon. After it was looted, the community moved up the hill at the end of the 9th century, where it became the abbey of Vézelay. According to Viollet-le-Duc, the abbey began the present church in about 1240. Dedicated to the Virgin, it only became the parish church in the 16th century, replacing the old church of Saint-Pierre, which gave the village its name and whose ruins stand at its southern edge.

By the 19th century the church was in a very poor state. It was on the first list of historic monuments in 1840, and in 1841 the young Viollet-le-Duc, then working on the basilica of Vézelay, took charge of its restoration. He worked on the choir, the chapels and the nave from 1842 to 1844 and finished with the bell tower in 1868. Paul Boeswillwald restored the porch at the end of the 1880s. When the church was again in danger in 1987, the villagers founded an association in 1988 to save it, and their work won heritage prizes in 2002.