Place Saint-Sauveur

In medieval times, the square was known as "Place du Pilori" (Pillory Square) because public executions were held here. Condemned prisoners would walk from the rue de Geôle prison up what locals grimly nicknamed "rue Monte-à-Regret" (Street of Climb with Regret or Street of No Return) to meet their fate. Even more macabre, corpses of suicide victims were publicly displayed hanging upside down from the gibbet as a warning.

The Église du Vieux Saint-Sauveur had an unusual second life: after the French Revolution, the church was stripped of religious function and converted into a grain hall, then a butter market. Most remarkably, from 1886 to 1928, it housed the complete skeleton of a whale that had beached at Langrune-sur-Mer in 1885 - making it perhaps the only Norman church to ever serve as a natural history museum.

Archaeological excavations beneath the square revealed at least five successive paving layers from the 13th to 15th centuries, showing how medieval Caen continuously renewed its urban infrastructure. Among the discoveries was a children's cemetery from the 16th-17th centuries exclusively for infants - historians still debate why children were buried separately from adults in this location.