Sénanque Abbey

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Abbey with lavender fields

Abbey seen from above

The old dormitory room of the Sénanque Abbey

Sénanque Abbey (French: Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque) is a Cistercian abbey near the village of Gordes in the département of the Vaucluse in Provence, France.

[edit] First foundation

It was founded in 1148 under the patronage of Alfant, bishop of Cavaillon, and Ramon Berenguer II, Count of Barcelona, Count of Provence, by Cistercian monks who came from Mazan Abbey in the Ardèche. Temporary huts housed the first community of impoverished monks, who found patrons in the seigneurs of Simiane, who enabled them to build the abbey church, consecrated in 1178. By 1152 the community already had so many members that Sénanque was able to found Chambons Abbey, in the diocese of Viviers.

Other structures at Sénanque followed, laid out according to the rule of Cîteaux, mother house of the Cistercians. Among its existing structures, famed examples of Romanesque architecture, are the abbey church, cloister, dormitory, chapterhouse and the small calefactory, the one space in the austere surroundings that is heated, so that the monks could write, for this was their scriptorium. A refectory was added in the 17th century, when some minimal rebuilding of existing walls was undertaken, but the abbey is a remarkably untouched survival, of rare beauty and severity: the capitals of the paired columns in the cloister arcades (illustration left below) are reduced to the simplest leaf forms, not to offer sensual distraction.

The abbey church is in the form of a tau cross with an apse projecting beyond the abbey's outer walls. Somewhat unusually, its liturgical east end faces north, for the narrow and secluded valley offered no space for the conventional arrangement.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, Sénanque reached its apogee, operating four mills, seven granges and possessing large estates in Provence. In 1509, when the first abbot in commendam was named, a sure sign of the decline of vocation, the community at Sénanque had shrunk to about a dozen. During the Wars of Religion the quarters for the lay brothers were destroyed and the abbey was ransacked by Huguenots. At the French Revolution the abbey's lands were nationalized, the lone last monk expelled and Sénanque itself was sold to a private individual.

[edit] Second foundation

The inner cloister of the Abbey

The site was repurchased in 1854 for a new community of Cistercian monks of the Immaculate Conception, under a rule less stringent than that of the Trappists. The community was expelled 1903–1926 and departed to the Order's headquarters, Lérins Abbey on the island of St. Honorat, near Cannes. A small community returned in 1988. In terms of official Catholic Church structure, Sénanque is currently not an abbey but rather a satellite or priory of Lérins.

Interior of the abbey church

The monks who live at Sénanque grow lavender (visible in front of the abbey, illustration, right) and tend honey bees for their livelihood.

It is possible for individuals to arrange to stay at the abbey for spiritual retreat.

Two other early Cistercian abbeys in Provence are Silvacane Abbey and Le Thoronet Abbey; with Sénanque, they are sometimes referred to as the Three Sisters (French: les Trois Soeurs).