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France's most famous cathedral is reopening. Here's how the astonishing restoration was pulled off and how a sense of sacredness was rekindled. The fire that came close to destroying the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris started under the roof in the ancient wooden attic near the base of the spire. It began a little after six p m. On April fifteen, twenty nineteen, the Monday of Holy Week, six days before Easter.

Inside the church, a mass was under way. Whipe and I had arrived in the city the day before, and at around seven that Monday evening we just happened to be passing by from the window of our cab on the poon Saint Michel. We caught sight of a flickering patch of orange on the roof. Minutes later, stopped in traffic, we saw flames shoot up the wooden spire. This belief gave way to shock. Notre Dame was really burning. No cathedral is more important to France or to the world.

For more than eight hundred years, Notre Dame has stood at the center of French life and has been the setting for historic events, both religious and secular. In twelve thirty nine, King Louis the Ninth, also known as Saint Louis, delivered what was purported to be Jesus Crown of Thorns to the cathedral. In nineteen forty four, as German bullets were still flying outside, General Charles de Gaul attempted a

mass to celebrate the liberation of Paris. Through it all, Notre Dame largely escaped the bombs and blazes that ravaged other cathedrals. Wind of stability in the Sea of change. It became one of the world's most visited monuments, as well as a place millions told sacred. When we returned to the scene later that evening, the fire had fallen and the lead roof had melted from the darkness On

the right bank. We gazed at the stone gable of the north transept, and through the small rose window we saw the flames consuming the oak roof crosses on the banks and bridges of the Seine. Thousands had gathered to watch, Drawn to the catastrophe, into the moment of communion. People were spreading the news on their phones. Some were singing the how Mary. We were visitors, but for most of the crowd this was home and a piece of their

hearts seemed to be dying. Now five and a half years later, Notre Dame has been brought back to life. In early December, the Archbishop of Paris is scheduled to celebrate a festive Mass in the restored church that week. The great doors will open to the public and offer a measure of healing to what has been a public drama. National Geographic was granted special access to the years of work by architects, craftspeople and scientists that has led to

this moment. In the summer of twenty twenty one, I returned for the first time since the fire, as the reconstruction was about to begin. This past summer, I went back again to witness its final stage, and also to learn about the clergy's plan for Notre Dame, I came to appreciate that the great lengths thousands of people have gone to not only to preserve this ex was a medieval monument, but also to revive it as a living church. There had never been a doubt that Notre Dame would

be rebuilt, but what form would it take? After the fire of French President Imal Immanuel Macron decreed that the cathedral should be restored more beautiful than ever. He set an ambitious goal to have the work completed by twenty twenty four and financed by the eight hundred forty six million euros that have been donated since the disaster. The crow suggested that something structural we knew would be nice

instead of the same old spire. Architects responded eagerly with far fetched ideas for a glass roof or a crystal spire. Preservationists were appalled, including Chief Architect of Historic Monuments Indipe Villeneuve, who at the time of the fire was already leading

a renovation of parts of Notre Dame. From Villeneuve's perspective, adding a modern spire would have been like giving Mona Lisa a nose job, whereas restoring Notre Dame as it was, architectural historian Jean Michael Gnawed told me back in twenty twenty one, with limestone, oak and lead, would be a cathartic act, a way to purge the grim memory of that night and to grieve the loss of the original structures.

In the end, the preservationists won. Notre Dame has been rebuilt exactly as it was before the fire, and as it was left in the nineteenth century by Eugene Emmanuel voile Le Duc, a pioneer of restoration. We don't have the right to touchet were restoring it, Villeneus says, we leave no trace of our passage. And yet the inside of the cathedral to anyone who has visited before, will seem utterly transfigured, righter than any person alive has ever

seen it. Walls, stained glass, paintings, and sculptures have all been cleaned and restored all at once for the first time since the nineteenth century. Visitors will be stupefied, awestruck by the interior of the cathedral, said Philip Schulst, president of the Special Public Authority overseeing the restoration. It will be a shock, but the interior will be new in

another way. While the building is owned and managed by the French state as a protected historic monument, the interior furnishings, which were extensively damaged in the fire, were for the most part not his store, and they belonged to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Paris. Church officials chose to undertake a complete new decoration. The cost is small in the context of the overall restoration, but it will have a

big effect on how visitors experienced the church. Early this past summer, I paid a visit to a foundry in the Rhine Valley to see some of the church's new furnishings. There I met Judome Bargey, a sculptor and designer who had been commissioned by the diocese to create a new altar and other of the churchical objects. In the furnace room, we watched two workers in visors and heavy aprons decant

molten white hot bronze into a series of molds. Rough unfinished sections of Barguet's new baptismal font sat on the floor nearby. His altar stood in the next room, waiting to be polished. Working with clay models, he explained he had searched for shapes that felt simple and immutable. The bronze altar is massive and books rooted to the spot, yet its curved sides above a pair of uplifted arms. The hope is that it will speak not only to the faithful, but also to the larger number of tourists

who are unfamiliar with the policism or even Christianity. You have to understand, Barday said, we have to understand that we're talking about the sacred. A week later, when I walked into the nave of the church and found it hard occurs to appreciate the beauty of the place, who was still a busy construction site. All around us, workers were dismantling scaffolding, stringing electrical cable, polishing the marble floor.

Our small group made our way deeper into the cathedral, creaning our necks to take into soaring vaults, and crossed the transept into the choir at the east end of the church. In the side chapels, there we could see the sumptuously refreshed wall paintings which date to Voile Yu Duke's nineteenth century restoration. Outside one chapel, a lone restorer knelt on the stone, her back turned to the soil of activity. She was applying dabs of pink with a

fine brush to a column painted with trefoils. In this confined space, some two hundred fifty different companies employing the two thousand workers have managed to collaborate in work in sequence over the span of the project. It functions because people are happy and crowds to be working at Notre Dame. Jos explained. We walked outside and then entered an elevator that carried us through the scaffolding to the top of the north transept, where we emerged in the church's attic.

We were above the sailing vaults, now in a place not accessible to the public, in the part of the church that was most ravaged by the fire, and where much of the work done over the past five years had been concentrated. Looking up, we saw blue sky through timber trusses that hadn't yet been covered with lead roofing. We picked our way through crowded walkways to the crossing where the two arms of the transept meet the knave and the choir. The base of the collapsing the spire

had plunged through the stone vaults. Here then crushed the main altar on the floor below. Stonemasons had only recently closed the jagged hole in the vaults. The smell of fresh wood walked in off the oak beams and spiral stairs of the new spire. Pressing on into the attic of the nave, we entered the new forest of triangular oak roof trusses. To replicate the original medieval roof, the

construction workers had relied on ancient techniques. The hand hued the massive timbers with traditional hand axes, which had themselves been forged by hand. The beams were then fixed in a complicated lattice with pegged mortise and tenin joints. One of the carpenters, Honked Silver, an American who moved to France for this project, grabbed a protruding peg and hung his weight from it to demonstrate its strength. Silver directed my eye down the nave along the center line of

the new trusses. The line was slightly curved. That deformity had been in the medieval original, and the architects decided to replicate it. Silver explained that it made things even more complicated for everybody. The new framework does include one important concession to modernity, fire protection. Fire resistant trusses of the crossing will isolate the spire and the two transept arms from the nave and the choir. A fire could

never again race through the entire attic. Should flames break out in this space, misters distributed throughout the attic will help suppress them until firefighters can climb hundreds of stairs. Exiting the attic at the front of the church, we spiraled up the narrow stone stairs of the south tower, passing the balcony that Voile le Duc had populated with grotesque creatures. At the top of the tower, we circled around to the east. The sands swimmable again but still

brown rolled and sparkled in the late morning sun. From the choir at the far end of the church, we could hear roofers hammering lead panels into place. The architect's decision to use lead, especially after the fire had spread that toxic material all over the cathedral and even outside it excited a public controversy, but the preservationists insisted it was more durable and impermeable than the alternatives, and that

the elaborate ornamentation could be reproduced without it. We are eye leveled now with a new spire inside and out. It's a faithful copy of Whiles L. Duke's intricate creation made from his nineteenth century drawings, and one exception is the gilded brass rooster at the pinnacle, which we could see glinting in the sun. Its Villeneuve's own design. The replacement was hoisted into place in December twenty twenty three. It carries inside it the relics of two Parisian saints

and a scroll naming all two thousand restoration workers. It carries symbolic meaning too. The rooster is a symbol of French identity, of hope and resurrection, and in this case, since Veneneuve gave his burid flame winged the flame shaped wings of a cathedral rising from the ashes. The original was badly battered from its fall during the fire, but was salvaged and will be displayed as a memorial of that night. As we made our way back down from the tower, we crossed in front of the Great Organ

on the balcony inside the front wall. It survived the fire, but had to be completely dismantled and cleaned, and for months tuners had been calibrating the eight thousand pipes one by one. With our backs to the towering pipes, we looked out at the walls and vaults of the nave. The stained glass glowed once again in the high windows. The soot from the fire, the lead, and the filth of the ages had been stripped from the stone walls, leaving them bright and creamy, with key stones in gold

leaf and ribs delicately outlined in rich Burgundy. The vaults looked impeccable. My greatest satisfaction is that you can't tell the vaults that collapsed and were rebuilt, Villaineude told me later. There's a lot to like about the restoration, said Lenaud, the historian. With the brutal pealing of the walls, latex was sprayed on them and then peeled off in part to extract the lead, has left the stones so white that some will feel the cathedral has lost elements of

its sacred character. It will take forty years of and condensation before we see the gray that the eyes appreciate. He now said to church officials, Notre Dame's sacredness drives not so much from the building itself as from what goes on inside it. The cathedral is, above all a place of worship, said Monseigneur Olivier Vadou duma that was built for the glory of God. Riveadou Dumas is the rector of Notre Dame, meaning he runs the place when

it's open. He's expected a record fifty million to come to Notre Dame in twenty twenty five, and he doesn't like to call them to us. The word visitor is a better fit for what he anticipates they'll experience once inside. He hopes a visitor just might become a pilgrim. The redecoration is designed to facilitate that. In addition to sculptor Bardet's liturgical furnishings, there will be fifteen hundred new cheers of solid oak with low backs gently curved at the top.

They'll be like a calm sea that acentuates the verticality of the vault. Designer Iona Valutrini told me. The new lighting, on the other hand, will do much more than illuminate the architecture, said Light sculptor Patrick Rimo is deploying a programmable array of one thousand, five hundred fifty l ed spotlights, each of which can vary in intensity and hue according to the season and what service is being held in

the cathedral. The shadowy candlelight atmosphere on the verge of vigil of Easter, for example, could give way to a joyous illumination on Easter morning. What's important is to treat the cathedral as a living place, Remo said. After the fire of the clergy debated creating a little space in the choir where Catholics could attend Mass in peace among themselves and away from the visitors. In the end be

decided to They decided the opposite. All masses will be celebrated of the main altar in the nave, with no barriers to keep tourists from wandering into the congregation. We have prietortis pritoritized, the demonstration of faith, of the tranquility of prayer. Ribadeau Dumas told me. The side chapels, which had been a hotchpodge, will become a pilgrim's way that gives a coherent account in paining the sculpture of the

Catholic Faith. From the entrance in the center of the west facade, visitors will move along the north aisle, where each chapel will be devoted to an Old Testament prophet, then around the perimeter of the choir, which will recount the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and finally along the south chapels of the nave, each of which will introduce a saint who embodies a particular value of the Catholic Church. A smartphone app will explain it all in

multiple languages. In the apse, at the far east end of the church, visitors will pass one of the most treasured relics in Christendom, the crown of thorns, said to have been placed on Jesus's head before the crucifixion. Notre Dame never advertised its presence much. Architect Sylvain du Buisson was commissioned to design a new reliquary to display the crown more prominently, to magnify something that's of an incredible humility,

he said. The artifact is a dried out woven wreath of rushes from which the thorns were long ago removed dubious. Whole solution is a twelve foot high, eight and a half foot wide altar piece of cedar. At the center is a glass hemisphere whose curved backed surface will be painted dark blue, but lit in such a way that the surface isn't apparent. Looking into it will be like looking into an infinite sky. The crown will hang within it.

On the night of the fire, the crowds along the sun had no idea what was happening inside the cathedral. You couldn't see the fire fighters racing up into the north bell tower just in time to save it from a collapse that might have brought down the whole building. You couldn't see the fire fighters and church officials entering the burning structure to save the crowd of thorns and other priceless artifacts, which for the past few years have

been kept safe in a vault at the move. By December, they will have been returned to their rightful home, as initially geographic. Much oppressed Paris officials had still not completed their investigation into what might have caused the fire. Perhaps it was some kind of electrical short circuit. On Saturday, December seventh, the French Estate will return the restored cathedral to the Archbishop of Paris. The Archbishop will bang on the doors with his large staff, and they will open

once again to the world. The great Workan will wake up and plasp a hand of thanks. When you walk into Notre Dame, the first thing you'll see will be Bardet's bronze baptismal font, the portal to the Catholic faith. His new altar will be visible at the crossing under the new spire. In the society in which were often tempted by despair, reopening the cathedral as a sign of hope, Ribadeau Dumas said that moment should be as powerful and memorable.

He said, as the sight of Notre Dame on fire was to the millions who sought in Paris and around the planet, it will be a kind of gust of joy that will I hope fill the world. Notre Dame's two bell towers featured ten bronze bells, the largest of which is called Immanuel, and hangs in the South tower, where it was undamaged by the fire cassed in sixteen

eighty three under Louis fourteenth. The fourteen ton billamoth measures nearly nine people wide in its base and has traditionally been played at Christmas or on other special occasions, ringing out a low f sharp. Eight smaller bells in the North tower had to be removed and cleaned of lead dust. Two were damaged and needed to be restored at Corneille Havard, a foundry in Normandy. Next Why scientists are rethinking ancient

gender rolls by Tom Netcalf. Archaeologists have found a new tool for studying human remains, and its up ending what we thought we knew about gender and past societies. In two thousand and eight, archaeologists discovered a tomb at Valencina de la Concepcion, a town near Seville in southern Spain, or the ret just burial sites ever found in the region. It was filled with lavish goods, including entire elephant's tusk, a dagger with a crystal blade, and dozens of mother

of Pearl beads. Scholars dated the tombs between forty two hundred and fifty two hundred years ago and suggested that, based on an assessment of the skeletal remains, the person buried there was between the ages of seventeen and twenty five. The remains in items in the grave convinced experts that this was a man who had held an elite position in society, but a recent study now suggests that this

important man wasn't a man. After all. Their paper published in twenty twenty three, a team of researchers from the University of Seville and the University of Vienna concluded that the person in the burial chamber was a biological woman. Their claim up ended long standing assumptions about gender roles in ancient times, but what's notable is how they reached their conclusion. It represents a new way for archeologists to get the details of history right. The researchers didn't use

any direct genetic evidence. They didn't study the corps of DNA to reveal a female's signature XX chromosomal pattern. Instead, they inferred the biological sex from a bit of protein in a tomb. In recent years, breakthroughs in the study of ancient DNA have enabled archaeologists to extract detailed information from remains, giving them insight into a range of physical characteristics such as sex and eye color. But the process

involved can be expensive in time consuming. Samples are prone to contamination, and there is often not enough DNA to recover since molecules degrade over thousands of years. But now proteins are providing a way for scientists to create a partial genetic profile in the absence of DNA. These molecules, which give the body structure and execute its biochemical functions, are often more stable and better preserved in ancient bones and teeth than DNA is. By examining proteins, scientists can

learn details of the DNA that created them. Of the tomb near Seviebe, the tooth enamel from the individual's remains showed the presence of proteins made by genes on an X chromosome, but no equivalent proteins made by genes on a Y chromosome, That suggests the person in the tomb was biologically female acsex and not male x Y. Such techniques, called proteomics, are often cheaper and faster than traditional DNA

analysis and could transform archaeology. Although the method is only a few years old, it's already having a broad scientific impact. Like the researchers of the tomb in Spain, Peruvian archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer Gabriel Creato worked on a project that determined sex from proteins, which led to new insights into history. He sent teeth from the victims of a masked child sacrifice by the Chimu people of Peru to Glendon Parker at the University of California Davis, a pioneer

in proto proteomics. The protein means inside revealed the key sacrifices were male children. It really helped us to understand that, at least for this event, boys were the most important sacrificial victims, Preeto says. Chimu sacrifices involved hundreds of victims. It would be prohibitively expensive to do DNA analysis on each of them. But that's not to say DNA analysis has no role to play. It's just used to answer more specific questions. Proteomics and an ancient DNA work together,

Preeto says. In fact, some DNA analysis is going is ongoing for some of the sacrificial victims, for example, to show if any of them were related. Besides providing genetic information from animal and human remains, proteomics can be used to investigate microorganisms that caused historical diseases such as leprosy or plagues, to identify food residues on aged pottery, and to determine sources of fibers used in old textiles, which

could lend insight into long lost trading networks. Biomolecular archaeologist Michael Buckley at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom has developed a way to identify the species of an animal from an ancient bone by analyzing collagen, the main protein in bone. The technique was recently used to show that ivory found in a fifth, fifth or sixth century English grade came from an African elephant, which implies

a previously unknown trade route across the ancient world. At that time, were starting to generate much larger amounts of data in getting much better information about human interactions with animals in the past. Baby says every year more ancient remains are uncovered. Proteomics means each discovery is more likely to fill in the missing chapters of our history books, or, as in the case of that extravagant burial site found

in southern Spain, it could help rewrite existing chapters. For years, researchers assumed prehistoric societies in Iberia had been led by charismatic men. The discovery of the tomb near s View up ends that conventional thinking, suggesting that women could have been leaders too, and prompting a new way of understanding the society. Roles of women in Copper Age Iberia and elsewhere next Nisian flair. Herodotus recorded in his histories the

pursion methods for assigning work. When building the canal between forty eighty three and four eighty y Z, groups of people drew lots for excavating sections. Often these teams were comprised of people who had been subsued into the Persian Empire. Laborers from Pholicia, of a skilled maritime culture, who what is now Lebanon, stood out for their engineering prowess. Workers and other groups attempted to dig straight down, causing, as Herodotus wrote, the steep size of the canale to pave

in doubling their labor. Since they made this spa the same bread at its mouth and at the bottom, this was bound to happen. The Phoenicians, however, knew they had to dig the channel much wider than necessary at the top, and so showed the same skill in this as in

all else they do. Taking in hand the portion that fell to them, they dug by making the topmost span of the canal as wide again as the canal was to be, and narrowed it as they worked lower, until at the bottom their work was of the same span as that of the others. The investigation carried out by archaeologists between nineteen ninety one and two thousand and one confirmed that some sections indeed had been dug on the slant,

while others were vertically nature. Structural differences across sections of the channel corroborate herodotus description of various groups apparently following their own techniques, offering insight into the multicultural aspects of the construction work. Imperial motivations A man a plan of.

to create a canal. Nevertheless, the colossal financial and logistical burden of excavating a canale might not have been justified simply to avoid passing around the same case, the peninsula could be rounded by sea in only a few days, with the benefit of the experience and co operation of locals who knew how to read the weather, it would have been possible to avoid meeting another major storm so wide Exerxes opt to build the canal. A superstitious fear

of the sea may have played a part. Then, of course, there was the element of propaganda. Such an audacious feat of engineering would surely have sent a powerful message to the Greeks. The pursion invasion, who was unstappable and sir reder was the only option. Heeraditus offers his own plausible theories as to the king's motivations. As far as I can judge by conjecture, Xerxes gave the command for this digging out of pride, wishing to display his power and

leave a memorial. With no trouble, they could have drawn their ships across the peninsula, yet he ordered them to dig a canal from sea to sea. The canal therefore carried an element of grand standing. Xerxes, like other Persian sovereigns, wore the titled King of Cans. Like many who had come before him, he seems to have shared the compulsion

to leave his mark on the world. In book six of his history as Herodotus recalls how Persian king Darius the First's fleet was wrecked in four ninety two b Z when it tried to round the Mount Athos peninsula. A storm destroyed hundreds of ships and more than twenty thousand men were killed. Since the coasts of Athos abound in wild beasts, some men were carried off by these and so perished. Others were dashed against the rocks. Those who did not swim perished because of that, and still

others by the cold. The Scuclus readings from National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has been Marcia. If you've enjoyed hearing this content, please give us a call at eight five nine forty two six three nine zero. Thank you for listening, and you have a great day.