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Heritage classified

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Origin and history

Lazenay Castle is a medieval house built between the end of the 13th and 14th centuries, located 3 km from Bourges, along the Auron River. This strategic site, close to the large tower of Philippe Auguste (medieval administrative center), was initially a strong house with ditches, built below a Gallo-Roman site marked by burials explored in the years 1990-2000. The estate was acquired in 1265 by Robert de Clamecy, an affluent bourgeois of Bourges, who erected there the porch house still visible today, accompanied by a mill today disappeared.

The château changed hands several times: sold in 1496 to Guillaume Compaing, who made arrangements there in 1503 and 1506, he passed in 1574 to the Jesuits of Bourges, offered by Abbé Jehan Niquet as a country residence. According to the sources, Charles IX and Catherine de Médicis stayed there two weeks in 1562 during the siege of Bourges. The site then included a circuit of walls, houses, and a chapel preceded by a gallery, with notable architectural elements such as windows geminied with carved lintels.

Confiscated as a national good during the Revolution, the castle was acquired by Alphonse Charles Soulard in 1876, who joined a bourgeois house, relegating the medieval house to the role of agricultural dependence. After passing under the property of the Petit Séminaire, he was finally transferred to the municipality of Bourges. The porch house, studied archaeologically in 1994, was classified as a Historic Monument in the same year, while the main body was transformed into a hotel residence in 1996. Its architecture combines a vaulted square porch (now equipped with a wooden floor) and a rectangular house with gemini windows, with traces of armored wall paintings from the 14th and 15th centuries.

Today, Lazenay Castle illustrates the evolution of a medieval estate, marked by successive reuses (agricultural, religious, residential) and a rare civil architecture for the region. Its classification protects the porch body, the remains of the ditches, and interior elements such as murals, although further excavations are still needed to clarify its original state.

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