inSPIREd and Dreaming of France

 The rules for this meme are: Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.
Maybe we can all satisfy our yearnings for France, until we get there again.

Sally hosts inSPIREd Sunday!

Killing two birds with one stone this week, I thought I'd post some additional shots from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Strasbourg France which we visited in October.
I will cover the astronomical clock in another post as the cathedral itself is so amazing.

The Strasbourg Cathedral soars out of a huddle of medieval houses, with a spire of such delicate, flaky, lightness it seems the work of confectioners rather than masons.





At 142 metres (466 feet), it was the world's tallest building from 1647 to 1874, when it was surpassed by St. Nikolai's Church, Hamburg. Today it is the sixth-tallest church in the world and the highest still-standing structure built entirely in the Middle Ages.

The Strasbourg Cathedral is also highly unique due to the fact that it only has one spire. The north spire was completed in 1439, but the planned south spire was never built. Why the south spire never got built is still under debate. What is known however is that the single spire of the Strasbourg Cathedral quickly became a landmark of the region, which is probably one of the reasons they keep it in its asymmetrical form.

During World War II, Strasbourg's Cathedral was seen as a symbol for both warring parties. Adolf Hitler, who visited it on 28 June 1940, intended to transform the church into a "national sanctuary of the German people" or into a monument to the Unknown Soldier; on 1 March 1941, General Leclerc made the "vow of Kufra" (serment de Koufra), stating he would "rest the weapons only when our beautiful colours fly again on Strasbourg's cathedral". During the war, the stained glass was removed in 74 cases from the Strasbourg Cathedral and stored in a salt mine near Heilbronn, Germany. After the war, it was returned to the cathedral by the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the United States military.

 I can just imagine these gargoyles spouting water on the tourists on a rainy day!