About Mont Sainte-Odile Abbey

Odile of Alsace was born around 662, the daughter of Etichon (also known as Adalrich or Aldaric), Duke of Alsace and founder of the Etichonid noble family. According to the 9th-century “Life of Odilia,” she was born blind, and her father, disappointed both by her sex and her disability, refused to accept her; her mother Bethswinda had the infant taken to Palma, likely present-day Baume-les-Dames in Burgundy, to be raised by peasants away from her father’s household. A 10th-century legend recounts that at age twelve, while staying at a nearby monastery, Odile was baptised by the itinerant bishop Erhard of Regensburg, said to have been led there by an angel; at the moment of her baptism, taking the name Odile — meaning “child of light” — she miraculously regained her sight. Years later, when Etichon fell seriously ill, Odile returned to nurse him, and her father, finally relenting to his daughter’s persistence, founded an Augustinian monastic community for her in the Hohwald forest of what is now the Bas-Rhin, on the site now known as Mont Sainte-Odile — also called Hohenburg Abbey — where Odile became its first abbess. Some years afterward, according to tradition, Saint John the Baptist appeared to Odile in a vision, showing her the site of Niedermünster at the foot of the mountain, where she founded a second monastery, including a hospital. Odile died around 720 at the Niedermünster convent. Pilgrimages to her shrine at Mont Sainte-Odile became widely popular among ordinary people and, from the time of Charlemagne onward, among emperors as well, cementing her lasting status as patron saint of Alsace and of those with eye ailments or blindness. The abbey itself stands atop the remains of the Mur Païen (Pagan Wall), a massive prehistoric dry-stone fortification encircling the mountain summit, predating the Christian foundation by many centuries.