Chartres or bust

Yesterday Jen and I decided to take a day trip out of Paris and visit Chartres. Since a trip there usually doesn't make a tourist's agenda, I'll explain. Chartres is actually a town about 55 miles southwest of Paris and is home to one of the grandest and well preserved Gothic churches in the world. There has been a church on it's site for at least 1700 years, but the "new" one was built around 1200 after a fire destroyed nearly everything that stood there. I say nearly everything because Chartres is famous for something else. The church is home to the veil of Mary - the garment that she wore when she gave birth to Jesus. It has a strange lineage though that can apparently be traced accurately to the 5th century. A Byzantine Empress gave the veil as a present to Charlemagne (King Charles I) around the year 800. The veil remained within the monarchy until 876 when his grandson gave it to Chartres. The veil was kept inside the church and was a mecca for Christian pilgrims until the church burned to the ground in 1194. Miraculously, the veil was untouched as it was stored deep in the crypt. Inspired by the unscathed veil, the city built a new church on the site and did it on a grand scale to accommodate the huge numbers of pilgrims. Recent tests on the veil show that the weaving technique and material date from the first century A.D. Over the years, the surrounding town flourished but today remains dwarfed by the massive cathedral in the center of it.

We decided to make our pilgrimage to Chartres to see it for ourselves. Some days you wake up and everything is just a bit out of sync and nothing goes quite as planned. That seemed to be our destiny on Saturday. The train ride out to Chartres was completely full and we had to spend an hour next to some loud, obnoxious kid. The weather turned during the train ride from a forecasted 58F and sunny to an overcast and windy 45F. We had about an hour to grab lunch before the second and last English tour of the cathedral started. As soon as we entered the restaurant, I knew it would be one of those experiences where you need to start planning for getting out of there the moment you arrived. Fifty minutes later, Jen's French onion soup had come, but not my meal. And we still hadn't managed to get a carafe of water on our table despite there being two servers and about a dozen customers. My patience was gone and I approached our server who was drying glassware for the last 15 minutes behind the bar. I didn't exactly improve relations between our countries, but I did manage to deliver my message of frustration in French and get the check. We left Jen's half finished soup on the table and got a sandwich to go next door. We took a couple bites outside of the church before rushing inside to catch our English tour.

We went directly to where the tour was supposed to start from only to discover that it was canceled for the day so we were on our own. Chartres cathedral isn't the easiest place to get around without a guide. It is very dark inside and there are few postings describing things. We used Rick Steves guidebook and some poor audioguides to make our way around the church. Chartres cathedral doesn't get the same number of visitors that say Notre Dame gets and thus probably struggles to keep the cathedral in good shape. It was good to see that there were massive efforts underway to fix and clean all kinds of things, but it was too bad that it happened to be taking place when we were there. Half of the church looked like a construction zone and scaffolding obstructed views and blocked certain corners of the church. To our dismay, the section in the back where Mary's veil is on display was closed. Closed! Were they renovating that too? Probably not, but it was enough to discourage these pilgrims from Paris. They had some scaffolding and a cloth drape over the glass case where it is normally displayed.

The high point of the visit was the stained glass. That is perhaps the other reason people visit Chartres. Since most pilgrims hundreds of years ago couldn't read, the church was built to teach them about Christ's life. You can see in the stained glass (with a good pair of binoculars) scenes from the Bible. Some of the most impressive stained glass windows in the world are in this church and have remained largely untouched since the 1200s. There are also vignettes carved in stone around the back side of the altar.

We think we've been lucky thus far in our Paris adventures to not have had a bad experience. After all, no matter where you are it's bound to happen eventually. I wouldn't call our trip to Chartres a bad experience, but maybe a bit of a bust. Still, we did escape from the bustling weekend scene in Paris and managed to check something else off our list.

Chartres

(click for photo album)

Apologize for the blurry images in some photos, but there was about as much light in the cathedral at some points as a movie theater. We did our best to enhance the light in Picasa.