About Souillac Abbey

Souillac grew up around an abbey dependent on the Benedictine monastery of Aurillac, its community established with support from Count Géraud, Abbot of Aurillac, and Viscount Frotard in 909; the Benedictines settled in the plain of Souillès — named from a local word, “souilh,” meaning a muddy, marshy place where wild boars once wallowed — replacing an earlier community reportedly founded there by Saint Eloi, and draining and transforming the swamp into a productive estate. The stone abbey church, the Abbatiale Sainte-Marie, was built between roughly 1075 and 1150, completed around 1145, ranking among the finest examples of Romanesque and Byzantine-influenced architecture in southwestern France, distinguished by its striking sequence of three domes — two along the nave and the largest at the transept crossing — and a chevet with five apsidioles. The church’s most celebrated sculptural works are a large statue of the prophet Isaiah, captured mid-dance in a swirl of robes and considered the most important depiction of a prophet anywhere in Romanesque art, and a tympanum from around 1130 depicting the legend of Theophilus of Adana — a disappointed cleric, removed from his post by a vengeful bishop, who sold his soul to the Devil and renounced Christ and the Virgin Mary, before repenting and being rescued through prayer to the Virgin Mary herself. During the French Wars of Religion, Protestant forces ransacked the town and abbey between 1562 and 1573, destroying the parish church of Saint-Martin, burning the monastery buildings, and attempting to blow up the abbey church’s walls — but in one of history’s more remarkable acts of artistic preservation, the western portal’s sculptures, including the Isaiah figure and the Theophilus tympanum, were salvaged and relocated inside the church onto its western wall, where they survive today. Restoration of the abbey church and monastery buildings began in 1632 under lord-abbot Henry de la Mothe Houdancourt and was completed by 1712.