To know all about the profession of marble worker of modern times.
"Kuros pearl of mother-of-pearl, Saint-Pons red, royal violet, peach blossom, Skyros ..." This curious vocabulary, as poetic as it is technical, is that of the marble workers when they speak of the colors of this metamorphic rock that has long been exploited in the Saint-Ponais.
So long, that the oldest known uses are votive axes dated from the time of the polished stone or a Gallo-Roman ex-voto dedicated to Dinomogétimar, a divinity of the source of Jaur.
Closer in time, the altar table of the church of the Cathar city of Minerva, consecrated in the year 456, is of Saint-Pons marble. Other places of worship have adopted this precious local material. In total, around twenty altars have been listed, including those of the cathedrals of Rodez and Girona, the abbey church of Cluny, the churches of Capestang and Quarante ...
And of course the abbey church of Saint-Pons created in 936 which, with time, became an imposing cathedral after various transformations. Mineral witness to its original architecture, the northern tympanum carries magnificent bas-reliefs, "The Last Supper and the Crucifixion", are sculpted in marble. A stone that is found in blocks cut for the construction of the present facade, built in the eighteenth century.
After a recent period of sleeping, the extraction of marble has taken over in recent years. It has since been used in luxury hotels of the Côtes d'Azur and adopted by the designer Pierre Ganalons. Not to mention that in Saint-Pons-de-Thomières, Languedoc France, you walk on sidewalks ... in marble.
It is the visit of a marble factory, equipped with a digital machining center (robot, flow saw, flat polisher ...), as the antenna of the community tourism office Minervois, Saint-Ponais, Caroux in Haut-Languedoc offers to discover!
