Posted on 04/15/2019 7:58:02 PM PDT by Morgana
Looking at the interior photos, many of the wood pews and stuff are untouched! It appears that the ceiling was arches of marble/stone - with the wood attic and roof above those arches.
Some of the roof fell down through the design of the arches - but it appears that the fire stayed up in the “attic”. Still a huge loss - but in looking at some of the overhead photos of the entire building covered in flames - I thought it had collapsed and on fire all the way to the ground floor.
Brave folks though if they were inside while the fire was raging above them. (I’m guessing they would have had to have done that!)
It took the Spaniards 700 years to boot the muslims out of Spain.
France better get started cleaning the stone age jihadis out or there won’t be a country called France.
I watched it live in a lobby with many other people, and everyone there kept asking:
Where are the firefighters? When will they finally arrive? Why are they not dosing the Cathedral with water?
Later on, the TV commentators said the firemen "didn't want to use water, as it would damage the cathedral."
After the roof collapsed, we could finally see firehoses being employed.
dosing = dowsing
A lot of it was probably removed for the ongoing construction project. That’s not uncommon.
After restoration
the church itself was a precious artwork.
The same question can be asked of any part of the structure, including especially the roof. When was the roof last replaced? At Notre Dame, I presume that the basic stone structure is all still medieval; I'm not aware of any major redesign that would have changed that. Windows are more fragile, but I'm sure the art historians can tell us how old the current windows really are. (Weren't the rose windows removed during WWII to protect from bomb damage? Or am I thinking of some other church?) How about the interior woodwork? Is it really all 8-900 year old wood, or has it been renewed over time?
This question is much on my mind because I'm taking the family on a European swing this summer. (I want my daughters to see some of the major sites before the Muslims destroy them.) Notre Dame is on our list, but I guess we'll now only be seeing that from a distance, though the roofless stone walls and towers will still be impressive. We'll also be in Rome. The Pantheon is a well-preserved Roman structure, but a church like Santa Maria Maggiore raises these questions in spades. Maria Maggiore dates to the 5th century, so it is late Roman, but it has been renovated and redecorated periodically over the years. I gather that the basic fabric of the church and the mosaics are original, but beyond that … well, I hope we get a knowledgeable guide who can tell me what is 5th century and what is 15th century. St. Peter's Basilica, of course, is the third church on that site. Whether anything at all remains of the first two, I don't know, but if I recall correctly, St. Peter's shares part of the foundation wall of Nero's Circus, which is appropriate because the Circus -- and Peter's place of burial in a convenient tomb along the road outside, now deep below the high altar -- is why the church is there to begin with. (The archaeology pretty solidly supports the traditional story.) Sorting this kind of stuff out is part of the fun of visiting these wonderful sites.
So: back to Notre Dame. The cathedral may be 8-900 years old, but a lot of the contents may be more recent. This may become very important when the restoration teams start deciding what to conserve and what to replace with modern (and fireproof) materials. Not everything has the same antiquarian value.
A word of advice to the restoration teams. Starting today, save every scrap of old material that is removed from the structure. Even if it's not reusable, it can be authenticated, framed and mounted, and sold to help with the fundraising for restoration. I'm probably not the only person here who has historical artefacts, most of them fairly trivial in nature, hanging on the walls. A blackened timber from Notre Dame, sawn down to size, would fit right in. Or a ruined chunk of stone to go next to my fragment of the Berlin Wall. Don't throw this stuff away.
Given the recent church fires in France, especially St. Suplice, those cheap expletives-deleted in the French government should have something staged nearby for a rapid response.
As someone who has actually had the experience of being in a religious community whose Church caught fire, I can tell you that a tremendous amount of stuff can be moved very quickly by a dozen or two motivated people who know what they are doing and are used to working as a team. It wouldn’t surprise me if ND was able to martial five dozen people.
Our Church was much smaller, so we weren’t able to get much from the sanctuary and very little from the nave, but we basically were able to empty the entire sacristy, which contained 95% of the stuff.
With ND’s height, and heat rising, I imagine that they were able to access the sanctuary and the nave for a good long time—and likely 20-40 minutes was all that was needed to get out everything that wasn’t actually carved in stone.
Being in a burning building isn’t best practice in everybody’s books, but not everyone is a snow flake. Provided you have some idea of what you are doing and can keep your head, in some circumstances it is the right thing to do.
Three cheers for the Catholic French, and those French of good will who lent a hand, and a Te Deum and a Non Nobis in gratitude for a far better outcome than I would have ever conceived.
My guess is that they know it started in two places. If they had even 40 minutes in the building while it was on fire, I think they’d have a fairly decent sense of this.
If it did start in two places, it would take more belief than I can muster to hold that it was not intentional. One might not have absolute certainty, but one would have moral certainty, which is sufficient to act upon.
Thanks. The video in the third link is interesting.
Could be. The fire starting in two places would pretty much clinch it. On the other hand, I could imagine a fire seeming to start in two places but not actually doing so. Like if it started in one place and then were quickly channeled internally to another spot where it flared up. To me there’s not enough info to draw solid conclusions yet.
“That is a blessing. You can re-build a great cathedral - though it will never represent the same historic accomplishment; but you can’t re-create the artworks.”
You rebuild the cathedral. This way, 800 years from now people will be talking about the fire that destroyed it in 2019 and how all the art was saved by the courageous members of the church. It becomes part of the cathedrals history.
And this is the time to pray that this fire starts the fire of revival across France and Europe.
I certainly don't intend to minimize this tragedy, but the spire that burned and collapsed was apparently itself a rebuild from the 19th century, as opposed to the original 13th century structure.
The most unfortunate loss from a historical standpoint seems to be the wood supporting the vault - which had been among the few original works of Medieval carpentry that survived in original form for 800+ years.
Apparently, most of the stained glass was 19th century work, fitted into the existing Medieval patterns, because of earlier restorations.
Apparently, all the bronze statues of the Apostles had recently been taken down from the towers, because of the renovations. When I read this - I thought, uneasily, that it seems like quite a coincidence.
I’ve been wondering what would have been involved in installing some kind of sprinkler system. It probably would have been an enormous and invasive project.
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