Five and a half years

When we got acquainted a bit with the Romanesque churches in this area I stumbled upon an article in the local newspaper about the church in Perrecy-les-Forges.

Perrecy-les-Forges

That is a good three quarters of an hour drive from here, hence we saved this for a later occasion. But never put off until tomorrow …
A couple of years later, we still had not seen the church, we read in the same paper that from April 2009 the church had been closed for security reasons. Hence we had been too late!
Later again we found out that one of the highlights of that particular church, the narthex with a beautiful tympanum and lovely carved capitals was open to the public.

During the restaration

In September 2013 we finally made a trip to Perrecy and found out that the narthex was indeed more than worth it. We could look inside the nave through the big doors, but we were not allowed to enter. All we could see were ladders and scaffolding.
After almost a year, around August 2014, we decided to send an email to the association involved in the restauration of the church. I had read in July 2014 on their website that the church was about to be re-opened to the public.

After the restaration

However, this sort of “news” is not always reliable, and the internet version of the local newspaper had not yet mentioned the festive opening of the church. That was enough reason to ask for a written confirmation of this news.
French in general are not terribly keen when it comes to answering emails from “strangers” (i.e. people they do not know the name of), so we were pleasantly surprised to receive an answer: indeed the church was open as of 8 July 2014!
The trip proved to be more than worth it. The church did not just boast an impressive collection of differently decorated and shaped imposts; the crossing in its own right was very impressive, if only for its dimensions. The five and a half years had been well used by those responsible for the restauration of the church!

The crossing

For an album on the subject, click here.

More Romanesque churches galore can be found in the immediate vicitiy of La Tuilerie de Chazelle.

Byzantine churches

When I was more or less finished with the map of Romanesque churches outside Burgundy and within Europe, I got the bright idea to incorporate one of the remaining pages of van Boxtel’s website, the one about "Byzantine churches", on this map as well. That was a bit more work than anticipated, and the result was a bit disappointing, partially caused by the fact that standard software utensils I had used so far all of a sudden were no longer available.

The "old" map of  Europe

To figure out how on earth to work with the revised software I decided to produce a separate map for the Byzantine churches. That turned out to be quite successful, were it not that I could only see the map on my screen when I was logged in as the owner of the map; if I was not logged in I could not view the map. After a lot of trying, cursing and swearing (I was on the verge of throwing my PC through the window) I finally found, hidden deep inside the software, an option to make the map publicly accessible. The next step, but I will wait a while with that one, is to remove the Byzantine churches from the Romanesque map. Here follows a very concise introduction to this new map.

Byzantine churches in Europe and the Middel East

Other than the Burgundian pages, this page did not claim any form of completeness. It really was a subjective choice of the maker of this site, and not a choice based on the "best", the "best preserved" the "historically most interesting buildings in an area".

Colours per country, towns alphabetically ordered

1. The pins have the same colour per country , hence green is Italy, red is Turkey, etc.



2. The place names are alphabetically ordered per country.

A typical entry

Typical entry
3. Each entry (hence each church or building) has at least one picture, in most cases copied from van Boxtels website, where possible however taken from my own stock in various Picasa Albums. If the latter is the case a link to the appropriate album is included. Also the accuracy of the location on the map is given : 100% is spot on, 50% means in the right town,


but exact location unknown to me.


The link to the website of La Tuilerie de Chazelle can be found here.