Cathédrale Sainte-Anne d'Apt

Apt

The Church of Apt is ancient: it was represented at the Council of Arles in 314, and its first known bishop, Octavius, sat at the synod of Nîmes in 394. In the 5th century Saint Castor consecrated the cathedral to the Virgin. Ruined in 896 during a Saracen raid, it was rebuilt in the 11th century, then again in the 12th, and in 1179 the relics of Castor were transferred to a new crypt. Visitors still go down into the two superimposed crypts: the lower one, of Roman or Merovingian date according to the sources, is said by tradition to have sheltered the veil of Saint Anne; the upper one, of the 11th century, is a small nave eight metres long lined with niches for Christian sarcophagi, whose altar is a pre-Romanesque table set on a Roman funerary stone. Yet it is to Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin, that the town owes its renown. The legend, reported in 1532 by Jean de Nicolaï, has it that Charlemagne discovered her relics thanks to a blind young man seized with ecstasy; it rests on a clearly apocryphal correspondence. The reliable evidence goes back to the 12th century, as does the feast of 26 July, and Apt counts among the oldest churches in the West devoted to her cult. In 1660 Anne of Austria came to thank the saint for having made her a mother and offered gold reliquaries; she encouraged the continuation of the royal chapel, built from 1643 to 1664 by François de Royers de La Valfenière. The treasury keeps the ‘veil’ itself: an 11th-century Fatimid fabric, an Islamic banner said to have been brought back from the crusades, which used to be carried in processions.

Wikipédia — Cathédrale Sainte-Anne d'Apt ↗

Getting there : Rue de la Cathédrale, in the old centre of Apt. Free entry, generally from 10 am to 5 pm (6 pm in July and August); guided tours of the crypts and treasury, by reservation, €5 per person, free for under-12s (tourist offices; to be checked).

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

Ambient sound