Bonjour,

I wasn’t going to include a posting on Notre Dame, but then I learned several interesting things during our visit. Notre Dame is French for Our Lady of Paris and is a Gothic Catholic cathedral. It was built between 1163 and 1345. The cathedral is 420 feet long by 157 feet wide and 226 feet high. The building suffered major damage on multiple occasions with the worst coming during the French Revolution but the cathedral has been restored on several occasions. The results are what we see today.

Now I’ll give you the interesting parts. The stained glass windows and some of the detailed carvings were created, at least in part, to educate the common person. Since most people did not read back in those days, biblical stories were put into the stained glass windows and other decorative places to teach the uneducated people the stories in the bible. I had never given a thought to “why” stained glass windows had bible scenes in them. I suppose I just thought it was more decorative.

One of the key features that make Notre Dame famous are its flying buttresses. These are arched external supports. But the flying buttresses were not planned. The walls of Notre Dame are quite thin and as the cathedral kept getting higher, the walls began to develop cracks. So the flying buttresses were a fix mandated by a problem that was not anticipated by the architect. Notre Dame was one of the first buildings in the world to use the flying buttress and still famous for it today.

1. You can see Vicky standing in front of Notre Dame on a cloudy Paris day. We entered right away and had a nice stay. When we got out, the line to enter was out to the street, well behind where I took this photo.

2. This is the entrance archway that is behind Vicky’s head in the previous photo. A local guide said that carvings such as these also told biblical stories to the masses of people who could not read.

3. I don’t know what story from the bible this might be, but there is a story in those stained glass windows.

4. You can see the flying buttresses at the back of Notre Dame in this photo.

5. This is a more close-up look at the flying buttresses.

Voila,

Bill