Pontigny: a Cistercian abbey church the size of Notre–Dame in the middle of the fields (last photos)
[These are the last three of my series on the abbey church of Pontigny.
Tomorrow I am leaving for two weeks to spend the holidays with family in the UK, then in Normandy. Therefore, there will be no more uploads from me until January 6 or 7. I will however keep monitoring my Flickr groups as I always do when away.
I thank all of you who follow my stream for your visits and the comments you left during this year 2024 that’s coming to an end, and I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you in 2025!]
A few days ago, at the beginning of December 2024, celebrations televised worldwide heralded the coming back to life of the Notre–Dame Cathedral in Paris, after the accidental and disastrous timber roof fire of April 2019. This joyous occasion was an opportunity to vaunt the vastness of the cathedral.
Well, today and over the following days, I invite you to discover a much-less known, but much more surprising, church, the abbey church of Pontigny, in the equally little known département of Yonne (a part of Burgundy), about 150 kilometers southeast of Paris. There, at the edge of a small village and framed by the tall trees of a dark forest, an enormous vessel of stone stands in the middle of wheat fields, towering above everything else, even though it doesn’t have towers nor spire...
It has two things in common with the cathedral of Paris: at 120 meters, the length of its nave almost that of Notre–Dame (130 meters), and in addition to being an abbey church, Pontigny is also a cathedral... It is also the oldest, as when the first stone of Notre–Dame was laid in 1163, Pontigny was already built.
The abbey of Pontigny was founded in 1114 by a group of monks led by Hugues of Mâcon. For the second time after the foundation of La Ferté the year before, monks of the Cîteaux Abbey left the mothership to found a new monastery. Pontigny thus became and will forever remain “the second daughter of Cîteaux”, an important claim in an order than will number more than 2,200 monasteries of monks and nuns.
Donations flow in. Counting more than a dozen Kings of France among its benefactors, not to mention a good half-dozen Kings of England, the abbey will also give refuge to three archbishops of Canterbury, two of them saints: Thomas Becket and Edme (or Edmund) of Abingdon, whose relics are still buried in the choir of the church.
Built largely thanks to generous funding by Thibaut the Great, Earl of Champagne whose daughter Adele will marry King Louis VII, the church we can still admire today is built between 1138 and around 1150, although additions will be made to it as late as the early 1200s. It is mostly Romanesque, but the influence of the Gothic style can be seen in the latest rows of the nave, and of course in the ceiling, which is rib-vaulted —the first time this architecture was ever used in Burgundy.
During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the abbey will be one of the richest and most powerful of the Western world, counting more than forty priories, vast lands and assorted properties in many different cities. Its library was also famous.
Listed as a Monument historique (Historic Landmark) on the very first list drawn up in 1840 by Minister Prosper Mérimée, the abbey church is almost all that’s left of the abbey, which was severely damaged during the Hundred Years War, then during the Wars of Religion, and finally during the French Revolution.
Since 1954, the abbey church is also the legal seat and headquarters of the “Mission de France” territorial prelature, which inspired the so-called “worker priests” which are quite well known in France. For that reason, the abbey church was granted by the Pope the status of cathedral of that prelature.
I’ve had the pleasure to visit this grandiose church, the largest ever in the Cistercian order, in late May 2024, within the scope of a photographic mission for the Fondation pour La Sauvegarde de l’Art Français, one of the not-for-profit organizations I work for as a pro bono photographer. I was given access to what’s left of the cloister, a part which is normally off-limits.
The overwhelming apse of the abbey church dominates the parish cemetery. Here you can see those flying buttresses I mentioned in an earlier caption. They were added during the early Gothic period to support the top part of the nave.
I doubt this “support” was really necessary. Sometimes “modern” features were added just to look up to date, “hip” if I dare say... :o)
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!
Pontigny: a Cistercian abbey church the size of Notre–Dame in the middle of the fields (last photos)
[These are the last three of my series on the abbey church of Pontigny.
Tomorrow I am leaving for two weeks to spend the holidays with family in the UK, then in Normandy. Therefore, there will be no more uploads from me until January 6 or 7. I will however keep monitoring my Flickr groups as I always do when away.
I thank all of you who follow my stream for your visits and the comments you left during this year 2024 that’s coming to an end, and I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you in 2025!]
A few days ago, at the beginning of December 2024, celebrations televised worldwide heralded the coming back to life of the Notre–Dame Cathedral in Paris, after the accidental and disastrous timber roof fire of April 2019. This joyous occasion was an opportunity to vaunt the vastness of the cathedral.
Well, today and over the following days, I invite you to discover a much-less known, but much more surprising, church, the abbey church of Pontigny, in the equally little known département of Yonne (a part of Burgundy), about 150 kilometers southeast of Paris. There, at the edge of a small village and framed by the tall trees of a dark forest, an enormous vessel of stone stands in the middle of wheat fields, towering above everything else, even though it doesn’t have towers nor spire...
It has two things in common with the cathedral of Paris: at 120 meters, the length of its nave almost that of Notre–Dame (130 meters), and in addition to being an abbey church, Pontigny is also a cathedral... It is also the oldest, as when the first stone of Notre–Dame was laid in 1163, Pontigny was already built.
The abbey of Pontigny was founded in 1114 by a group of monks led by Hugues of Mâcon. For the second time after the foundation of La Ferté the year before, monks of the Cîteaux Abbey left the mothership to found a new monastery. Pontigny thus became and will forever remain “the second daughter of Cîteaux”, an important claim in an order than will number more than 2,200 monasteries of monks and nuns.
Donations flow in. Counting more than a dozen Kings of France among its benefactors, not to mention a good half-dozen Kings of England, the abbey will also give refuge to three archbishops of Canterbury, two of them saints: Thomas Becket and Edme (or Edmund) of Abingdon, whose relics are still buried in the choir of the church.
Built largely thanks to generous funding by Thibaut the Great, Earl of Champagne whose daughter Adele will marry King Louis VII, the church we can still admire today is built between 1138 and around 1150, although additions will be made to it as late as the early 1200s. It is mostly Romanesque, but the influence of the Gothic style can be seen in the latest rows of the nave, and of course in the ceiling, which is rib-vaulted —the first time this architecture was ever used in Burgundy.
During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the abbey will be one of the richest and most powerful of the Western world, counting more than forty priories, vast lands and assorted properties in many different cities. Its library was also famous.
Listed as a Monument historique (Historic Landmark) on the very first list drawn up in 1840 by Minister Prosper Mérimée, the abbey church is almost all that’s left of the abbey, which was severely damaged during the Hundred Years War, then during the Wars of Religion, and finally during the French Revolution.
Since 1954, the abbey church is also the legal seat and headquarters of the “Mission de France” territorial prelature, which inspired the so-called “worker priests” which are quite well known in France. For that reason, the abbey church was granted by the Pope the status of cathedral of that prelature.
I’ve had the pleasure to visit this grandiose church, the largest ever in the Cistercian order, in late May 2024, within the scope of a photographic mission for the Fondation pour La Sauvegarde de l’Art Français, one of the not-for-profit organizations I work for as a pro bono photographer. I was given access to what’s left of the cloister, a part which is normally off-limits.
The overwhelming apse of the abbey church dominates the parish cemetery. Here you can see those flying buttresses I mentioned in an earlier caption. They were added during the early Gothic period to support the top part of the nave.
I doubt this “support” was really necessary. Sometimes “modern” features were added just to look up to date, “hip” if I dare say... :o)
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!