Notre-Dame-de-Prouille Monastery

The monastery Prouille or Prouilhe ( okzitan. Prolha ) was founded in 1206 by Saint Dominic and Diego de Acebo in the hamlet Prouille, which now belongs to the municipality of Fanjeaux in the French department of Aude ( Languedoc- Roussillon ). It is considered the cradle of the Dominican Order.

A few years before the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade established the St. Dominic with the permission of the bishop of Toulouse, Folquet de Marselha, in a ramshackle village then a monastery and developed it into a fortress against Catharism. Prouille became a haven for women who had converted to Catholicism from Catharism. The first nuns in Prouille belonged to the Augustinian order. On August 15, 1217 Dominic gathered his first followers at Prouille, to send them to the preaching mission in the world. With the Concordat of Bologna between Pope Leo X. and the French king Francis I, the monastery lost its autonomy in 1516 and became a royal Priory.

The monastery was with the exception of a keystone completely destroyed during the French Revolution and rebuilt in the 19th century according to the plans of the Dominican Lacordaire Romano-Byzantine style.