Archaeologists have revealed a treasure of history buried in Reims Cathedral.
Reims Cathedral is one of the French’s favorite monuments. The impressive 81 meter high building, a masterpiece of Gothic art, has reigned over the city for more than 800 years. Every year, 1.5 million visitors flock there to admire its collection of thousands of statues and its impressive ribbed vaults. Tourists from all over the world go there to admire Chagall’s stained glass windows, but few know that there is hidden in its depths, a little less than two meters under the visitor’s feet, a treasure buried since the High Middle Ages.
It began in June 1995, when Walter Berry and Robert Neiss revealed, after three years of intensive excavations, the hidden face of Reims Cathedral. By penetrating under the paving of the central nave of the cathedral, 3 meters deep, via a narrow staircase difficult to access and through underground passages strewn with stones, they discovered the remains of a baptistery with a tank of ten meters on each side, a sort of rectangular swimming pool. It had been there for centuries, around the year 500, in the middle of the building’s heating system.
The surprise was great when, by analyzing shards from the first half of the 5th century, archaeologists revealed the exact location of the baptistery of Clovis, king of the Franks from 482 to 511. “We can clearly guess this basin in which immersed the king of the Franks at the end of the 5th century for his baptism. He had to go down three steps for this partial immersion and then he was then sprinkled with oil three times, for the Father, the. Son and the Holy Spirit And then everywhere around us there are quite moving remains, Gallo-Roman on the one hand, and on the other hand from the paleo-Christian church which preceded the cathedral of Reims” reveals to France Info. Jocelyn Bouraly, administrator for the Center of National Monuments of the Palais du Tau.
It was a luxurious baptistery as evidenced by the blue and green colored mosaic fragments and pieces of marble found all around, with 2,303 sculpted figures and impressive dimensions of 6,650 square meters and 122 meters long …
For the moment, only a privileged few, archaeologists and historians from around the world, have the privilege of observing this treasure of history, during regular excavations. Visitors who come to see the Baptistery of Clovis will have to content themselves with contemplating a simple engraved slab placed on the ground, in the central nave, at the height of the 5th bay of the building which bears the following inscription: “Here, Saint-Remi, baptized Clovis, king of the Franks. If the treasure is not yet open to the public “for the moment”, the historian Patrick Demouy, specialist in the Middle Ages and the Cathedral of Reims, suggested to France Bleu, in the series “The mysteries of the cathedral of Reims”, that it could be one day.