Église Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption de Samoëns, Gothic church in Samoëns, France.
Église Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption de Samoëns is a light grey stone church with a steep slate roof and a square clock tower on the left, not a central tower. The tower has clock faces on two sides below a small peaked roof, and the main roof has three dormer windows. Inside, the choir is a half-dodecagon lit by five stained-glass windows (1982) above a marble altar dated 1775.
The church is first mentioned in 1167. It was destroyed in 1476 during the Bernese invasion, and rebuilding began afterwards: the porch and right aisle were finished in 1555, the choir in 1605, the left aisle in 1621 and the sacristy in 1840. In 1575 it became a collegiate church of the Diocese of Geneva, free of the Abbey of Sixt. The lower part of the bell tower dates from the 13th century.
The church became a collegiate church of the Diocese of Geneva in 1575 after breaking free of the Abbey of Sixt. Its choir windows, made in 1982, depict the Four Crowned Martyrs, patron saints of Samoëns's masons' brotherhood, along with Saint Francis de Sales, Ponce, founder of the Abbey of Sixt, and the local-born Bishop Biord and Cardinal Gerdil.
The portal of 1555 sits off the axis of the nave, shifted to the right after the Clervieux flooded and sanded the ground during the post-1476 rebuilding. The bell tower, the oldest part, keeps a flat roof where four corner pinnacles stood until the Revolution. Roof restoration work starting in autumn 2025 may restrict access.
The vault keystone replaced during the 1917 neo-Gothic renovation was removed and set into the wall left of the entrance; it carries the arms of the Henri Ier de Savoie-Nemours family. The 1917 interior work was funded by Marie-Louise Cognacq-Jaÿ, founder of the Samaritaine department store in Paris, in her native village.
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