Sillegny (; also ''Sillégny''; ) is a commune in the

Moselle The Moselle ( , ; german: Mosel ; lb, Musel ) is a river that rises in the Vosges mountains and flows through north-eastern France and Luxembourg to western Germany. It is a bank (geography), left bank tributary of the Rhine, which it jo ...

department Department may refer to: * Departmentalization, division of a larger organization into parts with specific responsibility Government and military *Department (administrative division), a geographical and administrative division within a country, ...

in Grand Est in north-eastern France. The inhabitants are referred to as the ''Sillegnois''.

Geography

Sillegny is located in the Seille Valley, a floodplain along the Seille river which flows near the village. In the west, the Côtes de Moselle massif and its outliers dominate the region. Loiville, a hamlet belonging to the commune, is situated in the north, over the Rû des Crux in the direction of

Coin-sur-Seille Coin-sur-Seille (; german: Selzeck) is a commune in the Moselle department in Grand Est in north-eastern France. See also * Communes of the Moselle department The following is a list of the 725 communes of the Moselle department of France ...

History

The

Roman road Roman roads ( la, viae Romanae ; singular: ; meaning "Roman way") were physical infrastructure vital to the maintenance and development of the Roman state, and were built from about 300 BC through the expansion and consolidation of the Roman Re ...

which connected Lyon to Trier runs west from the village along the Forêt Dominale des Six Cantons forest. Ruins of a villa were found near this road, what is a proof of the ancient occupation of Sillegny. Furthermore, the

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...

"-y" comes from the Latin

"-iacum" (which comes himself from the Gaulish language "-ac") indicates a rural estate near a stream (the Seille river). In the 11th century, Sillegny belonged to the abbey of Saint Pierre, and one century later to the

Bishopric of Metz The Bishopric of Metz was a prince-bishopric of the Holy Roman Empire. It was one of the Three Bishoprics that were annexed by France in 1552. The Bishops of Metz had already ruled over a significant amount of territories within the former Kingd ...

. In 1226 the name of the town changed and became Sulincium. In 1246 the bishop Jacques ceded the village to Sainte Marie abbey but the Diocese kept St. Martin church until the French Revolution. In 1635, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, Sillegny was nearly destroyed by the Swedish and the church became a pilgrimage place. From 1871 to 1918 and between 1940 and 1945, when Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by Germany (see Treaty of Frankfurt (1871)), Sillegny became a German town renamed Sillningen situated in the Imperial Province of Elsass-Lothringen. The bombings of 1944 destroyed almost all the village. During the German period, casemates (fortified gun emplacements) were built in the Forêt Dominale des Six Cantons, near ''Les Jurieux'' and Marly-aux-Bois (close to the Roman road) and along the D 67 road.

Sights

* Castle: demolished during World War II. The only thing remaining is the portal. * Chapel: located in Bois de Curelle, a wild in the Forêt Dominale des Six-Cantons. * Lorette Cross: built by Jacques Lorette in 1892. * Saint Martin church (), nicknamed ''the Sistine Chapel of the Seille''. Her nave was built in the 15th century. This

gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...

-style church had a massive fortified tower which was used for protecting the inhabitants in the troubled times. It is decorated with exceptional frescos of the second quarter of the XVIth century. File:Sillegny St. Martin Innen Langhaus West 1.jpg, Frescos of the church of Sillegny File:Sillegny, église Saint-Martin, fresque du jugement dernier.jpg, The Last Judgement fresco, Sillegny File:Sillegny eglise Saint-Martin fresques 3.jpg, Saint Christopher fresco, Sillegny

References

External links

* {{authority control Communes of Moselle (department) Moselle communes articles needing translation from French Wikipedia