08.18.24: Looking up

When visiting Europe, there’s one thing I can guarantee: You’ll tour more than a few very old, very large churches. Every town has one and each has its own interesting history.

I admit that the churches gave me a better understanding of a scene common to every World War I or World War II movie — the sniper in the church steeple. In every one of these small towns, the church steeple is by far the highest point. From a military viewpoint, whoever controls the highest point has the advantage.

Other than that, the churches start running together in my memory.

There are two exceptions, though: Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which was magnificent before being struck by fire a few months after our visit; and another Notre Dame Cathedral, the  Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen in Rouen, France, just north of Paris.

I took this photo looking up at the tympanum, the vertical recessed triangular space, above the main entrance to Notre Dame in Rouen. I liked how the column-statue of Saint Romain points up at the repeating arched artwork above so I grabbed the shot.

But it wasn’t the artwork or architecture  that made this cathedral memorable. After all, if you’ve seen one large, ancient European cathedral you’ve more or less seen them all.

What made this memorable was how the community uses the front of the cathedral as the background for a projection show a few weeks every summer … and we happened to be there.

My wife and I were on a Viking river cruise in France that stopped for two nights in Rouen. We had completed a variety of walking tours that day and were preparing to settle in for the evening when a Viking staffer suggested we walk back to the church to see, as she described it, “an amazing light show.”

My wife was tired from the long day and decided to stay in while I walked back into town. The light show turned out to be an amazing (yes, I’m stealing the description because I can’t come up with a better one) half-hour long video projection providing an exceptionally creative and artistic history of that region of France. The video was projected onto the outside of the cathedral and integrated various architectural elements of the structure into the story.

For instance, early on in the show a snake-like dragon wraps itself around the building before entering and exiting through windows or doors. Horses stampede across the  building before disappearing behind arches.

I’ve seen many projection shows but I’ve never seen one that did a better job integrating background architecture into the storyline. I was awestruck.

The next morning over breakfast on the boat I couldn’t stop talking about the show, so my wife and some friends decided to join me that night for another trip to the cathedral. Even on my second viewing, I was still awestruck, as was everyone else. So Notre Dame Cathedral in Rouen has become one of the lasting memories of that trip.

By the way, the current Notre Dame Cathedral in Rouen was built around 1144 AD on land that had been the site of a church since around 260 AD.  Over the centuries, the cathedral has been damaged by Viking raids in the mid-ninth century and by various wars, leading to repeated restoration efforts. And about a month ago, on July 11, the central spire of the cathedral caught fire during renovation work, reminding many of the fire that significantly damaged Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris during renovations in 2019. The Rouen fire was quickly brought under control by firefighters, limiting the damage.