From the hospital to the Cité de la gastronomie

The full story

The City itself presents the hospital’s founding as a legend: on his way back from a crusade, Duke Odo III is said to have survived a violent storm and vowed to found a hospital in Dijon for abandoned children. The Holy Spirit hospital stood at the gates of the town, beside the road to the south, and its island kept it apart. It took in abandoned children and pilgrims. Around the sick ward and the church stood lodgings for the religious community, service buildings and gardens: the whole complex was destroyed in the early 1780s.

The chapel of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem, built in 1459, stood in the middle of the hospital cemetery: the dead were laid out there before burial. The 17th-century extensions spared it by surrounding it with new buildings, around the Jerusalem courtyard. In 1504, work began on a great sick ward. In the 16th century, to fight plague epidemics, the town also founded the hospital of Notre-Dame de la Charité, then an orphanage, the Hôtel Sainte-Anne. Brought together in 1669 under the name of general hospital, these institutions became Dijon’s largest hospital in the 18th century. Around 1720, Jean de Berbisey, first president of the Parliament of Burgundy, paid for the terrace that bears his name.

The apothecary, the ancestor of our pharmacies, was used to store medicinal products and prepare remedies. The one that has survived dates from the early 1690s, with its earthenware jars, about sixty of them dated 1741. In the 19th century, the hospital became more medical: a school of medicine was built in 1838, and the small depository, the former morgue, can be recognised by the hourglass and upturned torches carved on its façade. Cold and draughty, the great sick ward was much criticised: in 1842 it was decided to turn it into a chapel, whose façade, already adorned with the sculpted group of Charity, was raised and topped with a bell-gable.

In 1947, the decision was taken to build a new hospital on the Bocage site. For the conversion, the City chose the Eiffage group on 15 December 2014, then bought the site from the university hospital on 25 January 2016. The signature of the project by the Béchu & Associés agency, the Corten steel “canon de lumière” (light cannon), faces the town and houses the Ferrandi Paris cookery school. Today, visitors can step into the chapel of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem, see the apothecary rebuilt inside Le 1204, stroll on the Berbisey terrace between the Tree of Liberty, a plane tree planted in 1798, and a replica of the Well of Moses, then discover the great chapel, now the “chapelle des Climats et des terroirs”.