Abbaye Saint-Satur, abbey in Saint-Satur, Cher, France

Abbaye Saint-Satur is a former monastery in the Loire Valley, 2 km north of the Sancerre hill. Its abbey church, now the parish church of Saint-Pierre, has a nave with three bays, a transept and an apse with three semicircular chapels. The building mixes Romanesque and Gothic elements: tall pointed windows with tracery, slender buttresses and a squared tower with a clock face under a dark slate roof.

A priest named Romble founded a convent here in the 5th century, in the seigneurie of Château-Gordon. Around 1034 Mathilde, daughter of Gimon, restored the abbey and installed Augustinian canons; the second Romanesque church was consecrated in 1104 by Archbishop Léger of Bourges. The English occupying Cosne took and ruined the abbey in 1361, and Protestants from Sancerre burned it in 1567. Abbot Claude de Toulongeon completed the vault and roof between 1617 and 1626.

The name Saint-Satur replaced the earlier Château-Gordon in the mid-7th century, when a chapter of secular canons was founded to receive relics of Saint Satur, a companion of Felicity and Perpetua martyred at Carthage in 203, sent by Pope Paschal I through Archbishop Raoul de Turenne of Bourges. Saint Satur is celebrated on 7 March, and the former abbey church now serves as the parish church of Saint-Pierre.

The abbey stands in the Loire valley, 2 km north of the Sancerre hill and 1 km from Saint-Thibault-sur-Loire. The former monastic enclosure is split into two adjoining courtyards: the conventual courtyard to the east, beside the church, and the abbot's courtyard, called Château-Gordon, to the west. The oldest surviving building, a 13th-century structure once used as a press and guest hospice, stands in the abbot's courtyard.

The abbey's oldest surviving building is not the church but a 13th-century structure in the abbot's courtyard, later called the pressoir or Château-Gordon; its upper floor once housed the hospice for guests. The north wall still shows repairs exacted from Berry noblemen who burned the abbey in 1143.