Chapelle du Marlenberg Marlenheim

The Marlenberg chapel was built in 1683 on the Marlenberg hill. When it was enlarged in 1772, a Baroque-style Way of the Cross was added.

There are several legends surrounding this chapel:

One is the existence as early as the 6th century of a Marian sanctuary (dedicated to the Virgin Mary) in a grotto on the hillside, in connection with the Merovingian kings who made the village famous. As early as 590, Bishop Gregory of Tours mentions the existence of "l'oratorium domus Marlegensis", a place of worship attached to the villa of the Austrasian kings. This sanctuary was located on the plain, where the royal villa would have been, rather than on the Marlenberg.

Another 15th-century legend tells of three brothers who, during a storm at sea, vowed to build a chapel in their village if they were saved.

Yet another legend has it that a thief was paralyzed while trying to steal the statue of the Virgin Mary, and remained so until the winegrowers arrived and brought him to justice.

In 1673, against the backdrop of the Counter-Reformation, Marlenheim bourgeois David Rapp had a cross erected on the site of today's chapel. This was only the prelude to the reconstruction of the building, destroyed during the Thirty Years' War, which began on March 21, 1683, under the aegis of Bartholomé Sieger, parish priest of Kirchheim, Marlenheim and Odratzheim.

Chapelle and its Way of the Cross brochure