On August 28, we went to Cluny with M. Lhomme... it was quite fascinating to see what remained of "the Lighthouse of the Occident" and to imagine what it must have been in its prime! The place was absolutely huge at one time. It had quarters enough to host 2000+ guests at one time (i.e. the king and the pope at the same time, witht their entire entourages) and it spawned more than 1500 (if I remember rightly) monasteries throughout Europe in the centuries that followed its commencement. Unfortunately, very little remains of it, thanks to the Revolution... and even more unfortunately, the majority of what remains has been turned chiefly into a university and a stud farm. One of the streets in the town of Cluny runs right through what used to be the nave of the church! :( All the same, to see the ruins gives one an idea of the grandeur that was once there... the museum of the abbey was one of the most fascinating parts!!! And best of the rooms that we saw in the museum (it closed before we could get all the way through it) was the library! There they had some of the most incredible old books... the one I remember the best was the Rule of the Order of St. Benedict... printed in the fifteenth century! There was a whole room that had all its walls completely lined, floor to ceiling, with books of this kind!
Anyway, on to the pictures (which cannot do the place justice)!
The building which housed the guest quarters, I believe... now a university dorm, I think.
This is a to-scale model of Cluny in its original state... it's hard to tell in the picture, but the metallic part (the far right section of the model in the picture) is what can be seen standing today. The wooden part is what is no longer around. And if you look closely, you might be able to see the to-scale monk that is standing on the sidewalk to the right of the building in the picture... that gives you an idea of the size!!!!
Here is what remains of one arm of the main church of Cluny.
This is a chapel that was built later. It was really fascinating because the statues that can still be seen today are prophets from the Old Testament and the statues that they supported (more than symbolically!) were the evangelists of the New Testament... unfortunately, these were destroyed in the Revolution.
A view of the remaining towers...
(As you can see, the weather was not the most cooperative for a day of exploring ruins. :/)
This building was the one wherein they kept the flour, and the basement of the same building was the wine cellar. The boat-shaped, chestnut rafters were a novelty at the time and their benefit was two-fold: their shape allowed the storage of more barrels of flour and the chestnut wood has a natural insecticide in it and kept the bugs from the flour - to this day, there is no need to clean cobwebs off the rafters!
Here you can see part of a leather model of Cluny! It was made by a cobbler over a century ago and donated to Cluny. The little tower (left one of the three main towers you see) and the smaller tower to the left of it are what remain of the church today.
Voila! Brittany and Audrey walking in the rain. :D
This was taken standing in what used to be the nave. To the left you can see what used to be the columns in the church - note their size! - and in the distance a little ways you can see the double archway that was the entrance to the monastery.
Huddled under an umbrella with Cluny behind us. :) ...Brittany, Audrey, Rémi, and myself...
Here, in 2-D, one can see what is and what was... the drawn buildings are what we saw in person; the rest was left to our imagination. Remember the size around of the columns from the picture above? Note that there were four rows of those columns in the nave alone!!!
This is one of the only pictures I was able to take in the museum. It is just to show the size of the fireplace necessary to heat a normal-sized room! They hardly would have had to split the wood at all... one could fit a small tree into a fireplace that size! :)
And, finally, a picture of the town of Cluny and the two towers that remain...
