Église Saint-Georges de Saint-Paulien, Romanesque church in Saint-Paulien, France

Église Saint-Georges de Saint-Paulien is a 12th-century Auvergnat Romanesque church, modified in the 16th century. It is built of large, squared stones in white, grey, black, beige, brown, pink and mauve, giving the walls a marked polychromy. Its nine-sided chevet has an axial window framed by a black-and-white keystone arch, flanked by two radiating chapels with polychrome columns and stone mosaics of flowers, diamonds, zigzags and circles. The west facade has a projecting arch over the portal and two windows, and a later bell tower with a tall, narrow spire rises above it.

The church was built in the 12th century and altered in the 16th, when the Romanesque facade was topped with a later bell tower. It may have been dedicated to Saint George of Le Puy. In 1840 it was among the 1,034 monuments on France's first list of protected historic monuments.

The stained glass windows were installed in 1953 and are the work of glass painter Jacques Le Chevallier. They sit within a Romanesque stone shell, so a visitor can compare the mid-20th-century glass with the much older polychrome masonry around it.

The church stands in the heart of Saint-Paulien, in the Haute-Loire department of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Visitors enter through the western façade, where a large projecting arch frames the portal and two windows; the nine-sided chevet with its polychrome stonework lies at the opposite, eastern end. Look for the black-and-white keystones above the axial window.

The nine-sided chevet is framed by two radiating chapels whose windows carry black-and-white voussoirs, each topped by a mosaic of polychrome stones forming flowers, lozenges, zigzags or circles. These small stone panels, easy to miss from ground level, are among the church's most specific ornaments.