Mont Saint Michel
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Posted by Jim Down in Religion section |
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Mont Saint Michel (Mont St Michel) is a small UNESCO World Heritage-listed island located just off the coast of the northern French region of Basse-Normandie, on the border with the neighboring region of Brittany. The island is best known as the site of the spectacular and well-preserved medieval Benedictine Abbey of St Michel at the peak of the rocky island, surrounded by the winding streets and convoluted architecture of the medieval town. In prehistoric times the bay were covered by the sea, which retreated over multiple glaciations, allowing erosion to shape the coastal landscape over millions of years. Several blocks of granite or granulite emerged in the bay, having resisted the wear and tear of the ocean better than the surrounding rocks. These included Lillemer, the Mont-Dol, Tombelaine and Mont Tombe, later called Mont Saint Michel.
Mont-Saint-Michel used to be connected to the mainland via a thin natural land bridge, which before modernization was covered at high tide and revealed at low tide. Thus, Mont Saint Michel gained a mystical quality, being an island half the time, and being attached to land the other.
However, the insular character of the mount has been compromised by several developments. Over the centuries, the coastal flats have been polderised to create pasture. The south coast of Mont-Saint-Michel has thus got farther to the shore and the mount. The Couesnon River has been canalised, reducing the flow of water and thereby encouraging a silting-up of the bay. In 1879, the land bridge was fortified into a true causeway. This prevented the tide from scouring the silt round the mount. There are currently plans to remove the causeway and replace it with a bridge and a shuttle.
The Abbey’s history
In 708, a dream led Saint Aubert, the bishop of Avranches, to create a shrine to Saint Michael at this site. Mont Saint-Michel then became one of the major pilgrimage destinations in medieval Christendom.
In 966, the Duke of Normandy entrusted the sanctuary to the care of the Benedictines of Saint Wandrille. The monks built a magnificent abbey which the Middle Ages considered as the image of the Heavenly Jerusalem on earth. In the 11th and 12th centuries, they constructed a Romanesque monastery with the church on the top of the hill.
A part of this abbey burned down in 1204. It was replaced by the famous “bâtiment de la Merveille”, a building constructed north of the church in a few years’ time that includes halls for the pilgrims and rooms strictly reserved to the monks (scriptorium, refectory). Then from the middle of the 13th century to the beginning of the 16th century, the monks completed the ring around the church on the east and south by constructing the abbot’s residence and buildings to house the abbey’s legal and administrative services. During the Hundred Years’ War, the village at the foot of the abbey was surrounded by massive ramparts.
The heroic resistance of Mont Saint-Michel to the English made the abbey a national symbol. The choir of the church, which collapsed in 1421, was replaced in peacetime by a Flamboyant Gothic structure. The abbey is thus an exceptional example of the full range of medieval architecture. In 1790, the monks left their monastery which was then used as a prison until 1863. After it was designated a historical monument in 1874, major works were undertaken to restore the monument to its former splendour.
With the celebration of the monastic’s 1000th anniversary, in the year 1966 a religious community moved back to what used to be the abbatial dwellings, perpuating prayer and welcome the original vocation of this place. Friars and sisters from “Les Fraternités Monastiques de Jerusalem” have been ensuring a spiritual presence since the year 2001.
At the same time as the abbey was developing a village grew up from the Middle Age. It flourished on the south-east side of the rock surrounded by walls dated for the most part from the Hundred Years war. This village has always a commercial vocation.
UNESCO has classed the Mont Saint-Michel as a world heritage in 1979 and this Mecca of tourism welcomes more than three million visitors a year.
The local Office de Tourisme is located in the Corps de Garde des Bourgeois (the Old Guard Room of the Bourgeois), at the left of the town gates (tel 02-33-60-14-30). Open daily all year except for Christmas Day and New Years Day.
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