Nos événements

At Leisele in West Flanders, near Alveringem, Saint Martin's church stands amid its churchyard. A parish is first recorded here in 1222, its patronage held by the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Éloi.

Of the original Romanesque church in ferruginous sandstone, remains survive in the central west wall. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century a late-Gothic hall church rose here. After a fire in 1583 the building was restored; the nave, transept and crossing tower were completed in 1609, a date still displayed on the transept gables. A further fire in 1908 caused great damage, and the church was restored in 1910. It is a three-aisled hall church, with a Romanesque round-arched portal in its west front and an octagonal crossing tower crowned by a spire.

The interior is covered by wooden pointed barrel vaults. Because of the 1908 fire, the furnishings are largely neo-Gothic. Yet the church keeps several older works: an eighteenth-century Martyrdom of Saint Adrian, an Adoration of the Magi after Jacob Jordaens, and a polychrome wooden triumphal cross and Madonna of the same century. The church is a protected monument.