Venasque

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Venasque
Venasque coat of arms
Venasque (France)
Venasque
region Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur
Department Vaucluse
Arrondissement Carpentras
Canton Pernes-les-Fontaines
Community association Ventoux-Comtat-Venaissin
Coordinates 44 ° 0 ′  N , 5 ° 9 ′  E Coordinates: 44 ° 0 ′  N , 5 ° 9 ′  E
height 137-639 m
surface 35.01 km 2
Residents 1,012 (January 1, 2017)
Population density 29 inhabitants / km 2
Post Code 84210
INSEE code 84143

Venasque is a french commune with 1,012 inhabitants (at January 1, 2017) in the Vaucluse department in the region of Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur . It belongs to the Arrondissement Carpentras and the canton of Pernes-les-Fontaines .

Thanks to its architectural cohesion and the idyllic, small squares and fountains, the village has been classified as one of the Plus beaux villages de France ( most beautiful villages in France ).

geography

The still largely fortified place with its towers, the Tours sarrasines , lies above the Carpentras plain , above the Nesque on a rock spur that drops steeply on three sides. Carpentras in the north-west is 11 km away and the Avignon TGV train station in the west is around 30 km away.

coat of arms

Description of the coat of arms : A gold Tolosan cross in red .

history

Venasque was a bishopric and namesake of the county of Venaissin . Originally, the place with the Vaucluse region belonged to the domain of the Counts of Toulouse . In the Albigensian Crusades they fell to the French crown. King Philip the Bold ceded the Comtat Venaissin to Pope Gregory X in 1274 . Until the French Revolution (1791) the place was under the control of the Holy See . Like the whole region, Venasque suffered from the Huguenot Wars and was besieged twice by the Protestants (1562 and 1564), but never captured.

In recent history, the importance of Venasque has declined sharply. In 1727 the city still had more than 1700 inhabitants, in 1946 there were only 371. In 2007 the community again had 1137 inhabitants.

Attractions

Church of Our Lady
The baptistery

The Church of Notre-Dame has been redesigned several times and has a carved altarpiece from the 17th century and a crucifixion painting from the Avignon School from 1498. A long corridor leads from the church to the baptistery . This unusual architectural monument is controversial in its dating. It used to be believed that its origins go back to the 6th century, to the time of the Merovingians . This would make it one of the oldest pre-Romanesque church buildings in France. But this early dating has meanwhile moved away. It was originally a square room, vaulted by a groin vault, surrounded by four apses with semi-domes. Blind arcades , which rest on marble columns with ancient ( Spolia ) or Merovingian capitals , structure the largely unadorned space.

Most likely, this building is not a baptistery, as was long believed, but a burial chapel. The octagonal opening in the floor would have been added later to justify the early dating, or a different-shaped grave opening was deliberately made into the shape of a baptismal font.

literature

  • Thorsten Droste : Provence . 4th edition. DuMont Art Guide, Cologne 1989, p. 250.
  • Ingeborg Tetzlaff : The Provence . 6th edition. DuMont Art Travel Guide, Cologne 1979, Fig. 77.
  • Rolf Toman (ed.): The art of the Romanesque. Architecture - sculpture - painting . Cologne 1996, p. 168.

Web links

Commons : Venasque  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Venasque on Les plus Beaux Villages de France (French)