by Adam PLOWRIGHT
The more than five-year reconstruction of Notre Dame cathedral has featured some near-miraculous recoveries, as well as several controversies.
Ahead of the official reopening of the cathedral on Saturday, AFP looks at some of the key moments:
– The saviors –
Paris firefighters won universal praise for their swift and decisive action on the evening of April 15, 2019, with officers later saying they thought they were only 30 minutes away from seeing the structure collapse.
AFP The image of the spire in flames crashing to the ground made front-page news around the world
Battling smoke and the risk of falling debris, they formed a human chain with church officials to evacuate the most precious artifacts and religious treasures, helping preserve most of the cathedral’s irreplaceable contents.
Others saw divine intervention in how a copper statue of a rooster that had sat atop the building’s incinerated 19th-century spire was found afterwards intact amid the scorched rubble.
Its contents — three relics, including a small piece of the Crown of Thorns supposedly worn by Jesus before his crucifixion — also survived, with the battered rooster now on display in a Paris museum.
Inside the cathedral, images the day after the blaze revealed that a giant gold cross on the altar was still standing amid the still smoldering wreckage, a symbol of hope and defiance for many on a dark day for Christians and the country at large.
– Contested design contest –
French President Emmanuel Macron called the fire