New splendor from 2024: Notre Dame will be more beautiful than ever

In 2019, the Parisian landmark Notre Dame is in great danger due to a fire.

New splendor from 2024: Notre Dame will be more beautiful than ever

In 2019, the Parisian landmark Notre Dame is in great danger due to a fire. In the meantime even the collapse is feared. Since then, the restoration work on the banks of the Seine has progressed well, and a reopening next year is not unrealistic.

Anyone who visited Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris before the terrible fire of 2019 will not recognize it after its restoration. "A lot more light will come in through the cleaned windows," said Lisa Bergugnat, curator of a just-opened exhibition on the cathedral at the Paris Museum of Architecture. The walls have also been freed from the soot and dirt of the centuries.

"Ultimately, the fire was also an opportunity to completely restore the cathedral," explains Bergugnat. So far, this has not been possible because the church, with around twelve million visitors a year, could never be closed long enough.

And of course the French state, which owns all the church buildings built before 1905, could never have financed such an extensive restoration on its own. The fire on April 15, 2019, the cause of which was never fully clarified, triggered a huge wave of dismay and willingness to donate worldwide.

A total of 854 million euros was collected, around half a million of which came from Germany. President Emmanuel Macron appointed an ex-Chief of Staff to be in charge of reconstruction. Although Macron himself briefly flirted with an "architectural gesture", i.e. a more freely designed reconstruction, it was decided to rebuild the cathedral identically and with original materials.

The exhibition in the Paris Museum of Architecture not only makes it clear what a daunting task this is, but first of all what the original master builders from the 12th century onwards achieved magnificently. At the beginning of the exhibition, some charred pieces of wood, stones and metal objects from the cathedral can be seen in a display case. It was a never-ending puzzle to find out where the remaining parts were installed, said Bergugnat. "A lot of the fallen stones ended up having to be replaced," she added. The same type of sandstone was found in various quarries around Paris.

2000 oak trees had to be felled for the reconstruction of the medieval roof structure, the last ones were felled in the past week. In order to work the trunks into beams, the craftsmen were given axes specially made for the purpose, the blade of which is engraved with the facade of the cathedral.

Among the gems in the Paris Museum of Architecture are the statues of the twelve apostles and four evangelists, which the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc grouped around the turret he designed in the 19th century. They had survived the fire unscathed because four days earlier they had been dismantled from the roof to be restored. They are now covered with new copper leaves and weatherproofed so they don't oxidize and turn green anytime soon. Among them is the Apostle Thomas, in whose features Viollet-le-Duc himself made a monument.

The ridge turret, which caught fire spectacularly in 2019 and fell through the roof into the interior of the cathedral, is to be rebuilt later this year. There had been a heated debate about the spire that marks the crossing of the transept and nave. Proponents of a modern version - for example in steel and glass and illuminated from the inside - pointed out that the burnt-down tower was only designed in the 19th century.

Meanwhile, the cathedral's stained glass windows are being cleaned in nine different workshops, including the Cologne Cathedral workshop. There are currently four windows from 1965 from the workshop of French glass painter Jacques Le Chevallier.

The curator of the exhibition was confident that the cathedral could reopen in 2024 as planned by Macron. It remains to be seen whether visitors who knew Notre-Dame before the fire will recognize them.