Timeline

Key figures

Origin and history

The Saint-Maurice church of Marcellaz-Albanians, in Haute-Savoie, has its origins in the 11th–12th centuries with a first church composed of four chapels dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, Saint Sebastian, Holy Spirit and Our Lady. These chapels, founded by noble or bourgeois families, also served as burial places. In the 15th to 16th centuries, two of them (Saint John the Baptist and Saint Sebastian) were shaved. In 1608, François de Sales, bishop of Geneva, noticed the dilapidation of the building and ordered work on pain of closure, leading to the restoration of the Notre-Dame chapel by the Randollet family and the union of the Holy Spirit at the high altar.

The construction of a second church began on 15 April 1624 and was consecrated on 27 January 1625 by parish priest Georges Cohendet. His bell tower, surmounted by a porch, became famous after a drama in 1739: lightning struck the structure, killing 22-year-old sonner Étienne Fontaine. In 1769, a new bell named Claudine was installed and blessed by the parish priest Claude Ducret. Between 1827 and 1844, the bell tower was raised to 28 metres, with a bulb and an arrow, marking the transition to the third church.

The present church, built perpendicular to the previous one between 1842 and 1844 according to the plans of architect Ignace Monnet, was consecrated in 1845 by Bishop Louis Rendu. The adjacent cemetery, replaced in 1954, became a parking lot in 1977. A local anecdote tells that a skull, supposedly that of a lord convicted of murder in the 18th century, was sealed in the bell tower before being stolen in 1974 – although no archive confirms this story. In 2025, a major renovation is planned thanks to a donation of €500,000.

The bell tower, dating from 1625 but enhanced in the 19th century, houses four bells. Father Michel Marullaz, a priest from 1988 to 2021, also marked the recent history of this church, one of the largest rural Albanians. The pedestrian square in 2014 and the death monument inaugurated in 1921 complete this emblematic heritage.

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