Kreisker chapel

About

The chapel Notre-Dame du Kreisker (in Léonard Breton Chapel Introun Varia ar C'hreizkear, in Latin ecclesia Beatæ Mariæ de Medio-Villæ), "gate of entry" of the episcopal city of Saint-Pol-de-Léon, is a major building of Breton religious architecture. "The boldest piece of architecture he'd ever seen," says Vauban on his way to Roscoff, his seventy-eight-metre-high granite bell tower, the highest Gothic monument in Brittany, is the prototype of many Breton bell towers. Collegiate in Marian worship, the Kreisker welcomed the pilgrims of Tro Breiz. Orgueil of the merchant corporations that financed and decorated it, it served as a town hall with three orders and as a capitular hall to the bourgeois brotherhoods of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries then, sheltering on occasion a roomette, of chapel devolved from 1680 to a seminary, renamed in 1784 Collège de Léon, before ending to be ruined by the Revolution.