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April 15, 2019 is a date that many Parisians will forget.
“We heard a lot of sirens here and we knew something vital was happening,” said Marleen Soto, a local tour guide.
Notre Dame, one of the finest examples of Gothic architecture on the planet, a global monument and home to millions of visitors, is on fire.
“It’s horrible,” Soto said. We were all in the street with our neighbors, with our friends from our community, and we were crying. Then we went home and watched it on TV and saw the (arrow) crash right into the ceiling.
The cathedral, which for centuries was the center of Paris and France, is now in tatters. Donations of nearly $1 billion poured in from around the world to help repair one of the city’s centerpieces, along the Seine River. The reconstruction is the new spire, made of wood from about 1,000 French oak trees and crowned with a phoenix and a time capsule, symbolizing the rebirth of Notre Dame. Although the rest of the construction is not yet finished, visitors still come to see its façade.
“I arrived here last year, in February 2023, and it was really one of the first places I got when I was reading abroad,” said Francesca Marie Maglalang, who is in Paris for a study abroad vacation and is spending on the outside. of Notre Dame.
Since flames tore through the centuries-old Gothic cathedral more than five years ago, visitors have been banned from its walls. The interior is expected to reopen in December, while the exterior is not expected to be completely redone until 2028. However, it was intended to reopen in time for the Olympics. This and the fact that visitors can only see it from the outside has left some disappointed.
“Coming to the Olympics is also one of the dreams of my formative years,” Maglagang said. “So I thought, maybe when I come back next year, it will be open, but it’s still not open right now. “
That’s not to say that visitors and locals alike don’t realize how temporarily they had to rebuild Notre-Dame. One of those other people is Aaron Schultz, who attended the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.
“It’s cool and inspiring to see,” Schultz said. “I clearly saw photographs (of Notre-Dame before the fire) and it looks like the photographs. It’s great to see the outside and there’s obviously a lot of other things going on here in Paris.
Soto said, “As a local guide, I’m here all the time and I see the progress, I see the progress and how the church was returned to them, and it’s crazy how they treated everything. And there are a lot of documentaries on TV where other people who paint here are interviewed and I’m very happy that he’s back.
Work on the cathedral continued day and night, weekdays and weekends, holidays, scorching summers and freezing winters. The task of rebuilding this immortal monument has experienced several setbacks, to which has been added a global pandemic and the death of General Jean-Louis Georgelin, the man of Despite this and medieval fabrics and strategies to remain faithful to the history of Notre Dame, remains close to the original five-year plan envisioned by President Emguyuel Macron after the smokestack went out.
“I commonly see the needle symbol collapsing and seeing the most sensitive part on fire, so it’s great to see it now in its current state,” Schultz said.
But the charm is still to enter the interior of the building and see the history of France written in the stained glass windows, arcades and sculptures. Walking through the doors of Notre Dame aims to give visitors a surreal feeling that can’t be discovered. anywhere else.
“I am excited to return internally because one of the main reasons I sought to come to Paris was my father,” Maglagang said. “He worked (in Paris) for a while and told me he liked coming back to Notre Dame, which is like one of his favorite places. He said when you walk into the church, it’s unreal. I wish I could revel in this one day.
In total, the restructuring and renovation cost about $900 million. The construction of Notre-Dame took almost two hundred years and generations of people have never gone to see the cathedral finished. This time, its rebuilders and others around the world can watch as this phoenix rises from the ashes.
“When we found out that the two towers had survived and the president was saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to do anything to save this church,’ then I thought, ‘Okay, we’re going to do anything,'” Soto “This is France. We need to preserve our history and our ancient monuments. And this is one of them, perhaps the most important.
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