Our Blog - Sorèze, France blog

May 8th and yet another holiday in France! Today is Victory in Europe Day, generally known as VE Day, and it marks the formal acceptance of the unconditional surrender of Germany to the Allied forces ending WW II. Not as big as May 1st, but still a holiday. We figured today was not a golf day since everybody who was on holiday would want to be playing golf (although not particularly great weather, either). So we decided to do a road trip! Mind you, there was a good probability that many shops and restaurants would be closed, although we thought that most of the museums and tourist-type things would be open (and we found that we were a bit incorrect in that assumption).

Our second stop was the town of Sorèze. Sorèze is much smaller than Revel ... less than 3000 people. The medieval village is known for it's half-timbered and corbelled houses from the 16th and 18th centuries. Corbelled houses are ones that have the upper stories protruding over the lower stories. The rationale for why homes were designed this way range from being a way to reduce taxes to enabling waste thrown from the upper stories to land a "safe" distance from the houses.

The bell tower is all that is left of the Eglise Saint-Martin, a parish church dating back to the end of the 15th century. The rest of the church was destroyed during the Wars of Religion

The Abbey-Ecole de Sorèze is the most important individual monument in Sorèze. It dates back to 754 with the founding of a benedictine abbey. It was a Royal Military School from 1776, then later a college (until 1991) that was well-known in France for the military leaders, philosophers and politicians. Unfortunately, while it is normally open on holidays, it is not open on Tuesdays (oops).

Part of the former Abbey is now a 3-star hotel, with the entryway in the former Place de l'Eglise. In the middle of the courtyard is a white marble statue which shows Father Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, a French ecclesiastic, preacher, journalist, theologian and political activist. He re-established the Dominican Order in post-Revolutionary France.

Église Notre-Dame de la Paix is a neo-Romanesque church built in 1862. Similar to the interior of the church in Revel, it was very "clean" but also had a much simpler altar. It did have some really interesting stained glass windows, almost like they were put together from shards of glass from older windows.

Sorèze was also a walled city, with a ditch built around the wall. The walls were eventually removed and the Allées du Ravelin were built on the former ditches. Across the street from one of the gates into the city sits the current town hall, housed in a building that used to be an old tannery.

There is also a Monument to the Dead here, erected in 1922 just down from where the town hall is today. It is the work of a local Sorèzien named Auguste Metge and it represents the faces of young soldiers from Sorèze leaving for World War I.

We happened to turn around and see a sundial painted on the side of a building!