Chartres Cathedral

An American colonel named Welborn Barton Griffith Jr. was handed an order in August 1944 to shell Chartres Cathedral. The reasoning was ordinary enough: the towers were the highest thing for miles, the Germans were presumed to be using them as an artillery observation post, and the building was in the way. Griffith asked whether anyone had checked.

Nobody had. So he took one volunteer, went forward past his own lines into the town, walked into the cathedral and climbed the tower. It was empty. To signal that back across the fields he rang the bells. The shelling order was withdrawn, and the windows and the sculpture and the eight-hundred-year-old vaults are still there because one officer wanted to look first. He was killed in action the same day in a village just outside town.

The Fire That Built It

The building Griffith saved exists because an earlier one burned. A fire tore through the town in 1194 and reached the cathedral; the timber roof went, the lead melted, and by morning almost nothing was left standing except the west front, its two towers and the crypt underneath.

The real disaster, as far as Chartres was concerned, was not the masonry. The cathedral's entire reason for existing was a piece of cloth, a veil attributed to the Virgin, given to the church in 876. Pilgrims came for it. The town's economy ran on those pilgrims. Everyone assumed it had burned.

Three days later the clergy came up out of the crypt with the relic. They had gone down when the fire started, shut the door and waited it out. The crowd read this as an instruction rather than a coincidence: the Virgin had not liked the old building and wanted a new one. Money arrived. Work began almost immediately.

Finished Too Fast To Look Medieval

Most great medieval churches took so long that the style drifts as you walk down them. Chartres did not. The bulk of the new building went up in about thirty years, which is why it reads as a single idea rather than a committee of centuries. It is the building people are sent to when they want to understand what Gothic architecture was actually trying to do.

The move that made it possible was the flying buttress. Push the outward thrust of the vaults onto stone arms outside the building and the wall no longer has to hold anything up. Thin the wall and you can fill it with glass. Chartres has something like a hundred and seventy windows, and an unusually large share of that glass is still the original thirteenth-century work — one of the most complete medieval glazing schemes anywhere. The deep blue in it has its own name.

One window is older than the rest of the building. A mid-twelfth-century panel now known as Our Lady of the Beautiful Window survived the fire and was reinstalled in the new walls, so a piece of glass that came through the flames is set into masonry built afterwards.

Two Towers That Do Not Match

The west front carries two spires from different worlds and makes no attempt to reconcile them. The south one is twelfth-century, plain, sharp, almost undecorated. The north one burned when lightning struck in 1506, and Jean de Beauce replaced it within a few years with something else entirely: late Gothic, worked over every surface, stone treated like lace. They have stood side by side ever since.

Inside, set into the floor of the nave, there is a labyrinth about thirteen metres across, a single path folding back on itself for roughly two hundred and sixty metres. It dates from around 1200 and nobody can say with certainty what it was for. It is usually explained as a walked prayer or a substitute pilgrimage, but no medieval document actually says so.

The Glass In Boxes

Twice in the twentieth century all of that glass came out of the walls: once during the First World War and again at the start of the Second. In the autumn of 1939 crews went up the scaffolding, removed the panels one at a time, numbered them, packed them in straw and carried them out of the city. The cathedral spent the war with empty window openings. When the glass came back, the numbers told everyone where each panel belonged.

Now

Chartres has been a World Heritage Site since 1979 and is still a working cathedral. A cleaning programme running since 2009 has been argued about steadily: stripping centuries of soot back to pale plaster either restores what the builders intended or invents a brightness nobody alive has seen, depending on who is talking. The labyrinth spends most of the year under chairs and is opened on certain days, when people queue up to walk it.