Alyscamps

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The Church of St. Honorat
Side chapel of the Church of St. Honorat
The baroque portal of the Church of St. Honorat

The Alyscamps (lat. Allissi campi, dt. Elyseian fields) is an ancient necropolis on the south-eastern edge of the old town of Arles in the south of France . Between the more or less preserved remains of the churches of St. Cesaire-le-Vieux and St. Honorat, antique stone sarcophagi are lined up on both sides of an approximately 500-meter-long avenue of plane trees .

The burial ground on the Roman road Via Aurelia , which was laid out in antiquity, gained in importance from the 5th century, when the worship of St. Genesius spread. Genesius (St. Genès) was a clerk in Arles, who was beheaded under the Roman emperor Maximian around the year 303 AD for refusing to confirm death sentences against Christians. Genesius was buried in the grave field, and so were the bishops of Arles .

With the onset of the streams of pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela , the importance of the Alyscamps increased in the 12th century. Here on the Alyscamps the Via Tolosana begins , the southernmost of the four main routes of the Camino de Santiago in France, the Aimeric Picaud in his Codex Calixtinus (5th book: Le Guide du Pèlerin de Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle) Via Aegidia ( Route des Saint -Gilles du Gard) calls. This is where the pilgrims gathered for their way to Santiago de Compostela. Aimeric Picaud recommends the veneration of the deceased saints in the crypt of St. Honorat in his writing from 1139.

The main parts of the Church of St. Honorat, built on the remains of a pre-Romanesque wall, date from the 12th and early 13th centuries. With numerous interruptions, work was continued on the church until the 19th century without it ever being fully completed. Choir, transept arms with chapels from the 15th to 18th centuries and the crossing with the bell tower have been preserved. Of five planned nave yokes, only the easternmost yoke, which was closed to the west by a temporary wall in the 17th century, was realized. Together with the Saint-Trophime cathedral in Arles, the church of St. Honorat is one of the great works of the second Romanesque period (12th century) in the Rhône-Provence.

In front of the St. Honorat Church are the remains of an early Christian cemetery, which can be dated to the 4th and 5th centuries.

In the Middle Ages the church of St. Cesaire-le-Vieux was the monastery church of the monastery of St. Cesaire. Presumably it was the successor church of the Sainte-Marie grave church where the nuns of the monastery were buried.

Particularly valuable, late Roman sarcophagi from the Alyscamps necropolis now form part of the sights in the Musée de l'Arles antique in Arles. The more simply designed sarcophagi, some decorated with symbols, remained on site.

The Alyscamps necropolis was originally much larger than the remains that still exist today. With the construction of a railway line in the 19th century, the southern part of the grave road was destroyed.

gallery

  • The remains of the Church of St. Cesaire-le-Vieux

  • The avenue of plane trees with sarcophagi

  • The Les Alyscamps necropolis with the Church of St. Honorat

  • Stone sarcophagus

  • Christian graves in the area of ​​the Church of St. Honorat

  • Nave wall of the Church of St. Honorat

  • Side chapel of the Church of St. Honorat

  • Vault detail in the Church of St. Honorat

literature

  • Marc Heijmans: Arles durant l'antiquité tardive. De la duplex Arelas à l'urbs Genesii (= Collection de l'École Française de Rome. Volume 324). École Française de Rome, Rome 2004, ISBN 2-7283-0626-5 , pp. 297–328 (not evaluated).
  • Thorsten Droste : Provence. A companion to the art places and natural beauties in the sunny country of France. 5th updated edition. DuMont-Reiseverlag, Ostfildern 2006, ISBN 3-7701-3927-5 .

Web links

Wiktionary: Alyscamps  - Explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Commons : Alyscamps  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 43 ° 40 ′ 17.5 "  N , 4 ° 38 ′ 12.8"  E