The Berne Cathedral viewed from a corner of Cathedral Square. The impressive gothic church is undergoing restoration, the result of which can already be seen to great effect on the arches at the front entrance. Interesting is that just below the spire, where the white scaffold is, the "cathedral masters" (a married couple) have an apartment. They sell entrance tickets when you climb to the top levels and are on hand to tell visitors about the cathedral's history. The lady who lives and works up there told me that for the best thing about living in the Münster is waking up every morning, opening the curtain, looking out and realising where they are and what they are doing to earn a living.
2 comments:
Actually, it is NOT a Cathedral. But tourists and (anglo-saxon) guides keep calling it like that... presumably because it's a "big church"...
A cathedral, by definition, is the seat of a bishop (cathedra: Greek for chair), but Bern was never the seat of a bishop... Our curch is just a... Münster, on Münsterplatz...
Still, nice photos.
The cathedral was built for the purpose of housing a bishop, but Protestantism reached Bern before its bishop did and the seat of bishop was aborted. The cathedral represents the last major work of late Gothic architecture in Europe.
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