page_title: Thoronet Abbey
section_title: The Abbey Church
hierarchical_section_title: Thoronet Abbey / The Abbey buildings / The Abbey Church
caption_attribution_description: Interior of Church, Le Thoronet Abbey, Provence, France
context_page_description: Thoronet Abbey is a former Cistercian abbey built in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, now restored as a museum. It is sited between the towns of Draguignan and Brignoles in the Var Department of Provence, in southeast France. It is one of the three Cistercian abbeys in Provence, along with the Sénanque Abbey and Silvacane, that together are known as "the Three Sisters of Provence."
  Thoronet Abbey is one of the best examples of the spirit of the Cistercian order. Even the acoustics of the church imposed a certain discipline upon the monks; because of the stone walls, which created a long echo, the monks were forced to sing slowly and perfectly together.
context_section_description: The Abbey church is placed on the highest point of the site, and is in the form of a Latin cross, about forty metres long and twenty metres wide, oriented east-west, with the choir and altar at the east end, as is usual. The exterior is perfectly plain, with no decoration.  Since only the monks were permitted inside, there is no monumental entrance, but only two simple doors, for the lay brothers on the left and the monks on the right.
  The door for the monks was known as the "Door of the Dead", for the bodies of monks who had died were taken out through this door after a mass.  They were first placed on a depositoire, a long shelf by the south wall, then buried directly in the earth of the cemetery.
  The simple bell tower was probably constructed between 1170 and 1180, and is more than thirty meters high. Order rules prohibited bell towers of stone or of immoderate height, but exceptions were made in Provence, where Mistral winds blew away more fragile wooden structures.
  Inside, the church consists of a main nave with three bays covered with a pointed barrel vault, and two side aisles.  The arches supporting the vault rest upon half-columns, which rest upon carefully carved stone bases about two meters halfway up the walls of the nave.
  The choir at the eastern end finishes with a half-dome vaulted apse with three semicircular arched windows, symbolizing the Trinity.  Three arcades in the nave give access to the other parts of the building. There are two small chapels in the apses of the transept, aligned the same way as the main sanctuary, as in the Cistercian abbeys of Cîteaux and Clairvaux.
  The chevet of the Abbey, the semi-circular space behind the altar, has no decoration, but the refinement of the workmanship, as well as the perfectly rounded form, was itself an expression of the religious ideas of the Cistercians.  The circle was supposed to approach the perfection of the divine, as opposed to the square, which belonged in the secular world.
  The three windows in the apse, the round oculus above, draw attention to the altar. Facing east, they catch the first morning light, and face the same direction from which Christ was expected to return to earth. They and the  four small windows in the transept let in just enough light to give life to the stone inside, particularly at the time of the sunrise and sunset, which were also the times of the most important religious services, lauds and vespers. The light coming through the windows changed the color of the stone and created slowly moving shapes of darkness and light, marking the passage of time, the essential element of the life in the monastery.
  The pale stained-glass windows date to 1935 - they were recreated following the model of 12th-century stained glass from Obazine Abbey in the Corrèze.
caption: Interior, facing east
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