What's left
What remains of Cluny Abbey
Cluny's great abbey church was quarried away stone by stone after the Revolution. Here is what that left standing.
See current tours on Viator ↗A church on an enormous scale
The third abbey church, known as Cluny III, was begun in 1088 under Abbot Hugh of Semur. It was the largest church in the world until St Peter's Basilica in Rome was rebuilt.
1790 to 1810: sacked, sold, quarried
The monastery was sacked during the Revolution in 1790, its library and archives burned in 1793, and the abbey church itself sold off and pulled down for building stone over the years that followed; by 1810 the monastery was mostly demolished.
What a tenth of the church looks like
Roughly a tenth of Cluny III's floor space survives today: the south transept, crowned by the octagonal Clocher de l'Eau Bénite, plus the lower parts of the two towers of the west front. Standing beside the transept, with open ground running away from it, is the clearest way to feel the scale of what used to continue from there.
The granary that survived
The Farinier, a thirteenth-century store for the monks' provisions and flour, still stands under its chestnut roof frame. It now holds the carved capitals from the choir of the lost church, a rare survival of the sculpture that once filled Cluny III.