Nos événements

The church of Saint Martin stands in Melden, near Oudenaarde, gathering into a single silhouette more than eight centuries of building history. To step inside is to enter a place shaped again and again by its age, yet never severed from its ancient core.

A Romanesque church of Tournai stone may have stood here as early as the twelfth century; the west tower and parts of the walls still recall it. In the sixteenth century a Gothic building replaced that church and the tower was raised. In 1871 the whole was rebuilt and enlarged in the neo-Gothic manner to designs by Louis Minard, lengthening the nave. The lower stages of the tower remain in Tournai stone, the rest in brick.

Within, the church preserves, among other works, a Raising of the Cross attributed to Simon de Pape, paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a stone figure of Saint Mark and a wooden Christ. The organ, of the late eighteenth century, came from the Jesuit college of Oudenaarde and was restored in 1909.