The Romanesque church that looked like a castle
Such is countryside driving nowadays: most of the time, you don’t even bother to look at a road map, you just program your destination into the GPS system and go wherever the lady in the speakers tells you to go. And thus it was that, wandering leisurely through southern Burgundy on a late January afternoon, and patiently waiting to be taken back to the A6 freeway that would lead us home, we happened upon this memorable and truly unique sight: the Romanesque church in the village of Manlay in the département of the Côte-d’Or.
I have, of course, seen many fortified churches, in ruins or still standing, and I know what they were for: protection of the local populace towards the latter part of the Middle Ages, when a relatively peaceful era gave way to the countrywide Hundred Years War. However, I had never seen an édifice that looked almost entirely like a Mediæval castle, and only very secondarily like a church...! The way the scales tip here in favor of the fortification v. religion is truly remarkable.
Dedicated to Saint Laurent (Lawrence), this late Romanesque church/castle was built, as expected, in the early 1300s —the war in Burgundy began in 1337 and ended only in 1430— and its walls are 1.8 meters thick. Apparently, it served its purpose well and survived that war and the subsequent Wars of Religion in the late 16th century, only to be burned down with the rest of the village by retreating Nazi troops in July 1944.
The sad fate of the church was brought in the 1950s to German Chancellor Adenauer’s attention by the parish priest, and Adenauer organized a fundraiser that produced 200,000 deutschemarks that were used in the early 1960s to fund the substantial restoration the church needed.
On the technical side, these three shots are noteworthy because, while they were taken with my usual and trusty 19mm tilt-shift lens, they were also taken handheld, as I was too lazy pressed for time (for fear that the great light would go away) to take the tripod out of the boot and set it up!
The Romanesque church that looked like a castle
Such is countryside driving nowadays: most of the time, you don’t even bother to look at a road map, you just program your destination into the GPS system and go wherever the lady in the speakers tells you to go. And thus it was that, wandering leisurely through southern Burgundy on a late January afternoon, and patiently waiting to be taken back to the A6 freeway that would lead us home, we happened upon this memorable and truly unique sight: the Romanesque church in the village of Manlay in the département of the Côte-d’Or.
I have, of course, seen many fortified churches, in ruins or still standing, and I know what they were for: protection of the local populace towards the latter part of the Middle Ages, when a relatively peaceful era gave way to the countrywide Hundred Years War. However, I had never seen an édifice that looked almost entirely like a Mediæval castle, and only very secondarily like a church...! The way the scales tip here in favor of the fortification v. religion is truly remarkable.
Dedicated to Saint Laurent (Lawrence), this late Romanesque church/castle was built, as expected, in the early 1300s —the war in Burgundy began in 1337 and ended only in 1430— and its walls are 1.8 meters thick. Apparently, it served its purpose well and survived that war and the subsequent Wars of Religion in the late 16th century, only to be burned down with the rest of the village by retreating Nazi troops in July 1944.
The sad fate of the church was brought in the 1950s to German Chancellor Adenauer’s attention by the parish priest, and Adenauer organized a fundraiser that produced 200,000 deutschemarks that were used in the early 1960s to fund the substantial restoration the church needed.
On the technical side, these three shots are noteworthy because, while they were taken with my usual and trusty 19mm tilt-shift lens, they were also taken handheld, as I was too lazy pressed for time (for fear that the great light would go away) to take the tripod out of the boot and set it up!