50 Fun Facts About Cathedrals

Which French ruler placed the crown on his own head at Notre-Dame de Paris in 1804 as Pope Pius VII looked on?

Napoleon I took off his laurel wreath and crowned himself, then crowned the kneeling Josephine, while the pope who had come to Paris to officiate recited a Latin formula.

Which architect is buried in the crypt of Barcelona's Sagrada Família, the church he worked on from 1883 until he died?

Antoni Gaudí rests in a church that was never a cathedral, despite its nickname: Barcelona's archbishop has his seat at the older Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia.

Which Archbishop of Canterbury was killed inside his own cathedral in 1170 by four knights loyal to King Henry II?

Thomas Becket was made a saint little more than two years after the killing, and his jewelled shrine drew pilgrims to Canterbury until Henry VIII had it destroyed in 1538.

A cathedral takes its name from the cathedra kept inside, which is what kind of object reserved for the local bishop?

A throne for the bishop is what a cathedra is: the word comes from the Greek for seat, and it is also the distant source of the English word chair.

In which London church did Prince Charles marry Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 before an estimated 750 million TV viewers?

St Paul's Cathedral won out over the traditional royal wedding venue because it offered more seating and allowed a longer procession through London.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa was built from 1173 to serve what purpose for the cathedral standing beside it?

Housing its bells is all the famous landmark was built for: it is a campanile holding seven of them, and it began to lean during construction because the soft ground could not bear its weight.

Which domed Istanbul landmark, completed in 537, was the cathedral of Constantinople before becoming a mosque in 1453?

Hagia Sophia remained the largest church in the world for more than 500 years, until the abbey church at Cluny in France was completed in the 12th century.

Which ruler ordered Saint Basil's Cathedral built on Moscow's Red Square to mark the capture of Kazan and Astrakhan?

Ivan the Terrible had it built between 1555 and 1561, and its nine onion domes, each topping a separate church, are shaped to suggest the flame of a bonfire rising into the sky.

Which novelist's 1817 gravestone in Winchester Cathedral praises her mind but never says that she wrote books?

Jane Austen was buried there because her brother Henry had clerical connections, and the epitaph, composed by another brother, dwells on her character and her faith.

Which arched outer support, used at Notre-Dame de Paris around 1180, let Gothic builders fill walls with stained glass?

Flying buttress arches carry the outward push of a stone vault across open space to a massive pier, so the wall itself no longer has to be thick enough to resist it.

Which architect was put in charge of rebuilding 52 City of London churches after the Great Fire of 1666?

Christopher Wren lies beneath his own domed masterpiece, where a Latin epitaph tells any reader seeking his monument simply to look around.

Which German city's twin-spired cathedral, begun in 1248 to hold relics of the Three Kings, was only completed in 1880?

Cologne celebrated the completion as a national event 632 years after work began, and at 157 metres the cathedral was the tallest building in the world for the next four years.

Which novelist's 1831 story of a hunchback stirred the interest that led to the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris?

Victor Hugo wrote the novel partly to save the neglected cathedral he admired, and the restoration it inspired ran from 1844 to 1864.

Which Italian city's cathedral, topped by a statue known as the Madonnina, took nearly six centuries to complete?

Milan began building in 1386 and finished the last details in 1965, and locals call it a fair-weather day when the Madonnina can be seen from a distance through the mist.

Which name is given to the great circular stained-glass openings, divided by stone tracery, in Gothic cathedral facades?

Rose window designs are also known as Catherine windows, after Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who was sentenced to die on a spiked breaking wheel.

Westminster Abbey is no cathedral: since 1560 the coronation church has answered directly to whom, bypassing any bishop?

The monarch has overseen Westminster Abbey directly since Elizabeth I made it a royal peculiar; it had served as a cathedral only briefly, in the 1540s and 1550s.

Which Soviet leader chose the site of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, dynamited in 1931, for a vast palace?

Joseph Stalin's Palace of the Soviets was never built: the flooded foundation pit became the world's largest open-air swimming pool in 1958, and a new cathedral was built on the site in the 1990s.

Which composer married Constanze Weber at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna in 1782 and had his funeral there in 1791?

Mozart had also been appointed an adjunct music director at the cathedral shortly before his death, and Vivaldi's funeral had been held there fifty years earlier.

Which Italian city's cathedral holds a famous linen burial shroud that the Dukes of Savoy brought there in 1578?

Turin has kept the cloth ever since, although radiocarbon tests by three independent laboratories in 1988 dated the linen to the Middle Ages, between 1260 and 1390.

Which capital's cathedral stands on a former Aztec sacred precinct and keeps sinking into an old lakebed?

Mexico City's cathedral took from 1573 to 1813 to build, and its uneven sinking once put it on a list of the world's 100 most endangered sites before engineers stabilised it.

Which Renaissance architect engineered the brick dome of Florence Cathedral without a temporary wooden supporting frame?

Filippo Brunelleschi laid the bricks in a herringbone pattern to hold them while the mortar set, and his dome, finished by 1436, remains the largest masonry dome ever built.

Which Impressionist painted the facade of Rouen Cathedral more than thirty times to capture it in changing light?

Claude Monet rented rooms across the street as a temporary studio in 1892 and 1893, then chose the twenty canvases he thought best for an 1895 exhibition in Paris.

Giles Gilbert Scott, designer of the red telephone box, was 22 when he won the contest to design which city's cathedral?

Liverpool picked his design although he had no existing buildings to his credit, and the cathedral, built between 1904 and 1978, is the longest in the world.

Which English city kept the bombed shell of its old cathedral as a memorial beside a new one consecrated in 1962?

Coventry's architect insisted the ruin be kept as a garden of remembrance, and the cross on the new high altar holds three medieval roof nails salvaged from the rubble.

St. Louis Cathedral, among the oldest in continuous use in the United States, faces Jackson Square in which city?

New Orleans has had a church on the site since the city was founded in 1718, and the cathedral is dedicated to Saint Louis, better known as King Louis IX of France.

Which English city's Norman cathedral holds Saint Cuthbert's shrine and appeared in the first two Harry Potter films?

Durham's cathedral also holds the remains of the Venerable Bede, and UNESCO calls it the largest and most perfect monument of Norman architecture in England.

The Camino pilgrimage route across northern Spain ends at a cathedral reputed to hold the remains of which apostle?

Saint James is said to lie in Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, which swings the Botafumeiro, the largest censer in the world, almost to the transept roof at speeds of up to 80 km/h.

Which Spanish city's Gothic cathedral holds the tomb of Columbus and reuses a mosque's minaret, the Giralda?

Seville's cathedral chapter is said to have vowed to build a church so grand that those who saw it finished would take them for mad, and it became the largest Gothic cathedral in the world.

Which film villain's head was carved high on Washington National Cathedral after a public competition for new designs?

Darth Vader glares down from high on the north-west side, and inside a fragment of lunar rock is sealed into stained glass honouring the Moon landing.

The Italian word duomo, used for the great churches of Florence and Siena, comes from a Latin word meaning what?

House is the meaning: duomo comes from the Latin domus, so the name says nothing about a roof, and a duomo needs no dome to earn it.

The pope's cathedral as Bishop of Rome is not St Peter's Basilica but which older church, founded in 324?

St John Lateran holds the papal cathedra, and a plaque on its front wall proclaims it mother and head of all the churches in the city and the world.

Which French city's cathedral, rebuilt after an 1194 fire, retains most of its medieval glass and a floor labyrinth?

Chartres drew pilgrims to the Sancta Camisa, said to be the tunic Mary wore at Christ's birth, and on certain days the chairs are cleared so visitors can walk the labyrinth.

Which French city's cathedral crowned the kings of France, including Charles VII in 1429 with Joan of Arc present?

Reims earned the role through the baptism there of Clovis, king of the Franks, in about 496, and through the Holy Ampulla, the sacred vial used to anoint French kings.

Which English city's cathedral has England's tallest spire and the best-preserved original copy of Magna Carta?

Salisbury also keeps a clock from about 1386, said to be the oldest working one in the world, which has no face and only strikes the hours.

Which emperor built the Palatine Chapel at the heart of Aachen Cathedral around 796 and was buried there in 814?

Charlemagne's chapel went on to host the coronations of thirty-one German kings between 936 and 1531, and in 1978 it was among the first 12 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Which satirist served as dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin from 1713 to 1745 and is buried inside it?

Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels, funded an almshouse for poor women while in the post, and his grave can be seen there along with that of his friend Stella.

On a Gothic cathedral, a carved grotesque only counts as a true gargoyle when it performs which practical job?

Draining rainwater is the job: a trough cut in the back sends it out through the open mouth and clear of the masonry, where it would otherwise erode the mortar.

St. Vitus Cathedral, which holds the tombs of many Bohemian kings, stands inside the castle complex of which capital?

Prague began the cathedral in 1344, when the city was raised to an archbishopric, and Charles IV intended it as a coronation church and family crypt.

Which Nobel Peace laureate led anti-apartheid marches from the steps of St George's Cathedral in Cape Town?

Desmond Tutu, the first Black Archbishop of Cape Town, made the church a meeting point for activists of all races, and his remains are interred in front of its high altar.

Which part of a cathedral, the central hall set apart for the laity, takes its name from the Latin for ship?

The nave gets its name from navis, and in Danish, Swedish and Dutch a single word means both this part of a church and a ship.

William Walker saved Winchester Cathedral from collapse between 1906 and 1911 by working beneath it in which trade?

A diver was needed because the trenches flooded: Walker worked in water up to six metres deep, laying more than 25,800 bags of concrete under walls that were sinking into peat.

Which English city's cathedral was reputedly the world's tallest structure until a storm blew down its spire in 1548?

Lincoln's lead-covered wooden spire is said to have reached 160 metres, and a carving inside, the Lincoln Imp, has become the symbol of the city.

Which country, the first to make Christianity its state religion, has Etchmiadzin, often called the oldest cathedral?

Armenia's patron saint, Gregory the Illuminator, is said to have built the first church there between 301 and 303, after King Tiridates III converted his kingdom.

Which French city's cathedral, built with one spire instead of two, was the world's tallest building from 1647 to 1874?

Strasbourg never built its planned south spire, and the lopsided result, which Goethe likened to a sublimely towering tree of God, became the great landmark of Alsace.

English churches such as York Minster take the title minster from an Old English word that first meant what?

A monastery is the root sense: Old English mynster rendered the Latin monasterium, and the title lived on as an honour for churches with Anglo-Saxon origins.

Which French city's cathedral has the world's highest Gothic choir but, after two collapses, was never finished?

Beauvais raised its choir to 48.5 metres under the vault, lost part of it in 1284, and then saw a 153-metre tower, briefly the highest structure in the world, fall in 1573.

Which English city's cathedral, nicknamed the Ship of the Fens, rebuilt its collapsed crossing as an octagonal lantern?

Ely lost its Norman crossing on a February night in 1322, possibly because foundations were being dug nearby, and the Octagon that replaced it is 23 metres wide.

Which English cathedral city keeps the Mappa Mundi, a world map from around 1300, along with a library of chained books?

Hereford nearly sold the map during a financial crisis in the 1980s, until large donations from a heritage fund, a wealthy philanthropist and the public kept it in the city.

Which English city's three-spired cathedral, its spires called the Ladies of the Vale, was besieged in the Civil War?

Lichfield's cathedral close was besieged three times in the English Civil War, costing the church its central spire and all of its medieval stained glass.

Which architect added the spire of Notre-Dame de Paris in 1859, the one that collapsed in the fire of April 2019?

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was himself the model for one of the statues of the Twelve Apostles that stood around the base of the spire: the patron saint of architects.