Église du Dompeter

Avolsheim

Alone amid the wheat, surrounded by its churchyard and its old lime tree, the Dompeter church — from "Domus Petri", the house of Peter — is held to be the oldest church in Alsace still in use. Tradition, written down as early as the 9th century, has it that Saint Maternus, the evangeliser of the Rhine plain in the 4th century, founded here, at a crossroads of Roman roads, one of the very first Christian communities in Alsace, preaching under a lime tree near the Sainte-Pétronille spring; no contemporary document confirms it, but excavations have established a Gallo-Roman and then Merovingian site beneath the building. The present nave was raised around the year 1000, and the church consecrated in 1049 by the Alsatian pope Leo IX, who gave it relics of Saint Peter and Saint Petronilla — nearly a millennium of continuous prayer. Long the mother church of the surrounding villages, the Dompeter nurtured fine popular traditions: childless couples would come and place a lump of sugar in the frame of the little window of the Sainte-Pétronille spring; if the sugar disappeared, the wish would be granted. The thousand-year-old lime tree, under which legend has Maternus preach, still keeps watch near the east end. Restored with devotion in the 20th century, the church moves by its Romanesque bareness: here there is no treasury, no flamboyant stained glass, but the rarest of riches — a Christian place of worship rooted in the same spot since the origins of the faith in Alsace.

Getting there : Isolated in the fields between Avolsheim and Molsheim, rue du Dompeter; reached on foot (10 minutes) from the village of Avolsheim by a path through vines and crops, on the Wine Route.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound