121 Paris, France: Notre Dame reset

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 Closed since the 2019 fire, Notre Dame opened again a couple of weeks back. Every day I visited the website a number of times, and finally managed to get a (free) ticket to get in. I was not disappointed.

To go back to the fire, a lot of people have forgotten how horrifically close we were to having the actual towers collapse. Huge bells weighing tons were in the towers, held in place by solid wooden structures. If the wood had burned, the bells falling would have demolished the towers – and the rebuilding of the cathedral would have been ten times more difficult. It has been said that we were only half an hour from such a scenario – this may be an exaggeration, but let’s say  we were lucky.

And so to today – this is the only chance you are going to get to see a spotlessly clean medieval cathedral, which is pretty cool. The cathedral has been rebuilt as it was before 2019, including nineteenth century additions like the rather odd spire. The only new additions are (I think) some stained glass, and the furniture – for example the magnificent modern bronze altar table. Guillaume Bardet designed and made  it after winning the competitive tender. He also did the central baptismal font  (which I forgot to photograph), and of course the bishop’s chair and the tabernacle.

Some older furniture survived like the 19th century pulpit.

So much has been written this last month about Notre Dame that I am too intimidated to add to it, but I hope a few of my photographs have an original angle.

 
































































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