Nos événements
A crown for the Virgin
In 2023, Melchior, a young bachelor, learns that the crown on the statue of the Virgin of Notre-Dame de Liesse has disappeared. As a jewellery student, he decided to make a new one. After a year's work, the new crown will be laid on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin (programme of the day, click here...).
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Event Host Building
Our Lady of Liesse
At the heart of Liesse-Notre-Dame, in the French département of Aisne, the basilica of Our Lady of Liesse has been a renowned place of pilgrimage for centuries. Tradition traces its origin to three knights of the house of Eppes, taken prisoner in the East during the crusades and, so the story goes, brought miraculously home through the Virgin's intercession; in 1134 they raised a first chapel for a Black Madonna venerated as the source and cause of joy.
The present church, in the Flamboyant Gothic style, was built from 1344 on the site of the chapel and enlarged in 1480 by Bishop Charles de Luxembourg. The sanctuary drew the greatest figures: Charles VI, Joan of Arc, several kings of France, and Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, who came to pray for the birth of an heir, the future Louis XIV. In the nineteenth century the building gained side aisles; it was raised to the rank of minor basilica in 1913 and listed as a historic monument in 1920.
A three-aisled cruciform church, it unfolds a long choir closed by a three-sided apse and a crossing tower crowned with an octagonal spire. The seventeenth-century high altar, in the Italian Renaissance style, was given in 1610 by Marie de' Medici; a black-and-white marble rood screen followed in 1616, and many ex-votos, among them a votive ship hung in 1692 by Admiral de Tourville, speak of the pilgrims' gratitude.
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