La tour s'est effondrée le 16/03/2023.
Since 2014, the restoration and development of the tower next to the apse of the church have revealed an exceptional set novel in which combine three supports, architecture, sculpture and painting, with the remains of immense interest.
The tower, square that's why we call it today, is dedicated to St. Victor. It is not, it seems, the Victor of Marseilles, martyred in 303 or 304, but Victor Damascus, a soldier martyred in Syria in the third century with Saint Crown.
The tower is divided into three zones: the lower part of the eleventh century, the middle part of the late Middle Ages and the upper part dates from the nineteenth century. Today, the interior of the tower houses a veritable archaeological and artistic treasures.
The restoration work is brought to light, totally fortuitous, an arch, its capitals and its supports placed between the apse and the tower. This is a real triumphal arch in stone, the average unit blocks perfectly trained and linked by along fine and regular. Gradually, we then discovered several remarkable detail: the columns that host the capitals are very slender, over 4 m high, they are made of corrugated drums all different from each other and seem posed with sharp joints, some of these drums preserving part of its original painted decoration, and above all, the column and its capital are completely disengaged from the wall. In spring 2016, cleaning walls, removal of the latest coating layers offer the opportunity to admire the visible paint layer within the eastern window. Fairly well preserved, it is probably the only witness still valuable and relevant to the scientific level of the painted decoration that was found in the lower part of the tower in the Romanesque period.
This clearly exceptional dimension of the discovery of Saramon also appears especially in the quality and originality properly astounding free columns. We must emphasize the uniqueness of this rise in the buildings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the South of France. Indeed, nowhere else, we see free columns as slender as thin, the drums, all different, were mounted with sharp joints without any warping or bending a media appears, over 900 years after that they were set up and after they received a new weight installed above them during the Middle Ages!
On March 16, 2023, this tower collapsed in seconds. The material report of this event is heavy: the tower is completely devastated. With this tragedy, French history and heritage are collapsing. The situation is urgent, and your help is more than precious. The municipality of Saramon needs to secure and rebuild this magnificent monument rich in art and history.
Make a donation to the Heritage Foundation: https://www.fondation-patrimoine.org/les-projets/eglise-de-saramon-1
