Church of St-Similien

Location: 47°13′13″ N, 1°33′33″ W

The Église St-Similien is another 19th-century church built on the site of older churches, dating back to the 5th century.

When I first moved to Nantes, I lived in a temporary residence for the university's foreign researchers. It's also in the centre of the city, but in a newer area, further south, closer to the Loire. The apartment I moved to was probably less than 2 kilometres to the north, but I had never really been in that part of the city before. So I was wandering around one day, and just a few minutes away I happened to come across this church.

The nave. The two people in the
centre are the American/
Canadian couple I ran into.

According to tradition, St. Similian was the third bishop of Nantes, in the early 4th century. He is sometimes said to have been the one who baptised St. Donatian. After Similian's death he was buried on a hill outside the city walls, which, like the tomb of Donatian and Rogatian, soon became a pilgrimage site. In the 5th century a church was built over the tomb.

That church was attacked by the Vikings in the 9th century, at the same time that they damaged the Roman wall, pillaged the cathedral and killed the bishop. Here, they destroyed the relics of St. Similian, and threw his head down the well, since that's the sort of thing that Vikings liked to do. The church was eventually repaired and expanded up until the 19th century, when it was torn down and replaced by a neo-Gothic church with a neoclassical facade. But that one was was torn down too, and completely replaced at the end of the 19th century with the current neo-Gothic church, which is actually still unfinished, as you can tell from the facade.

Altar of Notre-Dame de Miséricorde.

All the churches were oriented in different directions, but one thing that hasn't changed since the 5th century is the location of the well. It's unusual to find a well inside a church, but St-Similen has always been built around it. The current structure is from the 19th century, but the well itself is ancient. (Similian's head is probably no longer at the bottom.)




Apparently the church also has one of the oldest surviving baptismal fonts, from the original 5th-century building. Unfortunately I couldn't find that, in the few minutes I was there. Like the other churches that are not historical monuments, St-Similien is generally not open except during Mass, so I was only able to visit it once, and only briefly.

Rose window.

Altar of St. Anne

The one Sunday that I was there, it was pretty empty, as is often the case in French churches. It was so empty that the priest noticed me and knew I had never been there before. He wondered where I was from and what I was doing there, and said I could take pictures until he had to close up the church.

At the same time, there happened to be a random English-speaking couple there, wandering around taking pictures like me. The woman was American but her husband was a fellow Canadian. They were extremely impressed by this church, as if they had never seen anything so ornate before. I'm not sure how they ended up here, but if they thought this was a big church, I told them they should go visit the cathedral. They had no idea about that, but it's visible from the entrance of St-Similien, so I pointed it out to them and they went off to visit it.

View of the church from the observation deck of the
nearby Tour Bretagne.

Since St-Similien isn't an historical monument, I never had a chance to go inside again. It was open during the Journées du patrimoine in 2012, but I was too busy at other sites and wasn't able to come back to St-Similien. But I walked by it frequently. The Talensac outdoor market is nearby, as is Nantes' only skyscraper, the Tour Bretagne. It's not a very remarkable church (from a medieval point of view!), but as with St-Donatien, I liked that this site represents the whole range of Nantes' history. The well has been there since the 5th century, it was destroyed by Vikings, and now it sits in the shadow of a modern skyscraper.