Notre-Dame: The restoration of the heart of France – and the miraculous rescue of the Crown of Thorns

It wasn’t just Notre-Dame Cathedral that burned, it was the very heart of France, they say.

Parisians wept as they watched the catastrophe unfold, fearing for the lives of worshippers – and the survival of one of the most holy relics in the world.

Firefighters worked tirelessly to contain the blaze and save as much of the iconic building as they could, even as they contended with molten lead and billowing smoke.

Miraculously, no one died in the fire and the Crown of Thorns relic – whose exact location inside Notre-Dame was a secret known only to a few – was found and carried to safety.

On the evening of 15 April 2019, a pinnacle of human achievement went up in flames. The restoration of the cathedral in just five years is yet another testament to the skills of master craftsmen, and the generosity of those who donated to the project.

“Those pictures are still harrowing and the moving footage of the disaster still breaks my heart,” says Dr Emily Guerry, a tutor in medieval history at the University of Oxford.

“It has a place in lots of people’s hearts,” she says. “It’s a place where thousands and maybe millions have found succour over the years, both as a real place they visited and as an idea that they’ve explored through literature.”

President Emmanuel Macron decreed that instead of decades, the cathedral would be restored in just five years. An extraordinarily complex project had been made even harder by a deadline.

Not only was so much lost, but melting lead had sent plumes of lead dust into the air, covering much of the site in toxic dust. The clean-up required to make the cathedral safe would be considerable.

But as chief architect Philippe Villeneuve looked at the wreckage, he felt a flash of hope.

“All the stained-glass windows were spared, the great organ, the furniture, the paintings – everything was intact,” he realised. “It was doable.”

But it wasn’t just furnishings and features that were saved by firefighters – an extraordinary rescue mission salvaged the holy Crown of Thorns relic from the flames.

Dr Guerry, an expert on both Gothic architecture (of which Notre-Dame is the defining example) and medieval relics, says the Crown is “beyond value”.

Many Christians believe it is the same crown that the Bible says was placed on Jesus’s head before the crucifixion.

“It’s not just locked in the treasury, it’s kept in a very secret place that I think only one or two people know about,” she tells Sky News.

“So when the fire brigade was trying to evacuate the relics, they got everything out but the Crown of Thorns, because they couldn’t find it.”

One firefighter inadvertently grabbed a decoy copy of the crown before going back in through the ash clouds and found the relic, under directions from an official who knew where it was.

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Now, after five years, the cathedral is restored and ready for visitors. And some see it as better than ever.

“It’s horrible to say [of the fire], but every cloud has a silver lining,” Mr Villeneuve says, smiling. “The stone is luminous now. It almost glows.”

The painstaking process of scrubbing every surface free of lead dust exposed a brightness not seen for centuries.

“I’m excited to be sort of transported in time by being inside Notre-Dame,” Dr Guerry says, looking forward to her visit later this month. “It’s like walking back into the 12th century.”

Indeed, as he walked through the medieval wooden beams of the reconstructed framework – so complicated it is known as the “forest” – Mr Villeneuve remarked he felt the work was so seamless the inferno might never have happened.

“If I can make [cathedral visitors] doubt there was ever a fire, then I’ve erased the horror,” he says.

Notre-Dame officially reopens this weekend, with public access from Sunday. Such is the demand that visitors are recommended to book timeslots online on the cathedral’s website.