23 June 2012 – Lembras

Today we visited St Emilion, a village known for 2 features, a subterrainean church and wine. 60% of the the buildings in the town house wine merchants and 60% of the rest are restaurants. The village is surrounded by vineyards, many “grand crus”, growing merlot, cabernet savignon and cabernet franc grapes. However we passed the tempting tastings to tour the mediaeval heart of the village. St Emilion was a Benedictine monk who decided to become a hermit here in the 800s. Previously he had worked as a trusted worker in an estate in Brittany, but had been cought stealing bread to give to the poor. Fortunately his first miracle was to turn the bread into pieces of wood when he was apprehended, thus avoiding an unpleasant punishment, but decided to head for the hills after this. He ended up living in a cave above the Dordogne river and was credited with further miracles of healing. This became a place of pilgrimage and the village became a commercial centre, first for wheat and then for limestone. In the 1200s a wealthy local decided to build a church by hollowing out the hill and selling off the resulting limestone blocks so that the creation of the church was profitable. The resulting cave is huge considering the technology of the time. Height 11m, width 20 m and length 35m. Previous to this a series of catacombs had been dug in the area and these run for some 200m. Later a bell tower was built over the church. Since this weighs 4,500 tonnes it has caused structural problems in the columns in the church itself. All decoration from the church has been lost due to the deterioration after the French Revolution, but the church is still impressive. A fascinating example of mediaeval commerce and engineering.

Street in St Emilion

The entrance to the underground church

Nowadays the cave digging is for wine storage and we were told there are 200km of tunnels in the area.