Flashbacks to St. Denis

A few days ago I promised you a tour of St. Denis (pronounced "san denee") but then never got around to it due to the fact that I was about to board a night bus to Switzerland. You know how it goes.

I'm now back in Paris and, due to some worrisome complications with the pictures from that trip (you'll hear all about that mess in the next post...) I now have adequate time to catch you all up. Let us begin.

You may notice that the facade of St. Denis is oddly asymmetrical. The left tower was lost after it was struck by lightning in the 1830s and some moron architect tried to repair it with a stone that was too heavy and collapsed the whole thing.

Here's the view of the altar. St. Denis, like many other Parisian churches, was built on the foundations of much earlier structures. Legend has it that Christ himself consecrated the church, which is a nice idea but pretty logistically impossible considering that the earliest remnants of the structure are from the 400s AD.

Behind us is the altar. Although a building (probably a cult that worshipped St. Denis) existed on this site as early as the 400s, the earliest foundations of the present church date to the 770s AD.

The view of the church entrance and narthex. Most of the observable architecture in St. Denis today is the work of a guy named Suger, who undertook a massive remodeling of the church in the late 1100s and early 1200s, transforming it into a Gothic icon.

St. Denis is the first church to use the popular rose window design. The slightly later Notre Dame and other churches will readily adopt it in following years.

All but three of France's kings since 496 AD are buried in St. Denis. This tomb alongside the altar is Dagobert I's, who reigned in the early 600s.

Usually you can pay an entrance fee to wander around the royal tombs, but, as is typical in France, the workers were on strike. Why is this sign in English?

We had to content ourselves by admiring the tombs from afar. None of them actually contain royal remnants, however, because St. Denis was totally sacked during the French Revolution and all the bodies were removed and thrown into a mass grave, including the body of St. Denis himself, which had been buried under the altar. The theme of revolutionaries destroying historical monuments will crop up again and again in the history of Paris's buildings.

This relief on the exterior of the church shows St. Denis holding his decapitated head. The colorful story of his martyrdom involves him coming over from Italy to convert the Gauls to Christianity, but he ends up getting his head chopped off. Ever the dedicated preacher, he marches along for miles carrying his head in his hands, and the spot where he finally collapses is the site of the St. Denis church.

A view from the side exterior, with the back of the rose window.

Church Week will continue with pictures of Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle on Thursday. Be there or be eternally damned.