Église Sainte-Anne et monastère des Bernardines de Dijon

Dijon

Around 1125, Stephen Harding, abbot of Cîteaux, had settled at Tart, three leagues from his monastery, nuns who had come from the priory of Jully, where the wives of the monks of Molesme lived: Tart was the first Cistercian abbey for women, mother of eighteen houses, and its abbess held a chapter of the abbesses of her filiation. Five centuries later there were no more than a handful of nuns left at Tart; the Catholic Reformation and a royal edict of 1606 were pushing country convents to withdraw into fortified towns. In 1623, under the abbess Jeanne de Courcelles de Pourlan, with the support of Bishop Sébastien Zamet, the community moved to Dijon, where it took the name of Bernardines. The monastery was built from 1624 to 1632 and completed in 1767; the church from 1699 to 1709, to the designs of an Oratorian, Louis Trestournel: a centralised plan crowned by a tall dome, dedicated to the Virgin, to Saint Stephen Harding and to Saint Bernard. In 1792 the Bernardines were driven out and the monastery became a barracks, then a hospice for a century and a half. Of Tart, only a few stones remain in the village; it is here, beneath the dome that has become a museum of sacred art, and in the cloister where Burgundian life of former times is presented, that the women's branch of the white monks survives.

Wikipédia — Monastère des Bernardines de Dijon ↗

Getting there : Ten minutes' walk from the place de la Libération, 15-17 rue Sainte-Anne. The two municipal museums — the museum of sacred art in the church, the museum of Burgundian life in the cloister — are open all year, admission free (times and closing day on the website of the museums of Dijon).

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

Ambient sound