Old Town Geneva

Tuesday we toured Old Town Geneva.  We had a walking tour with a Dorothy, our guide.  She was full of energy while telling us of the history of the several old buildings.  One building we toured was the Cathédrale St-Pierre.  The church was begun in 1160; the original building took 72 years to finish and has had a multitude of bits and pieces added on over the centuries. A small side-chapel, the Chapelle des Macchabées, was added in 1397; more like a museum than a church – was tacked onto the main west front of the building in 1752, facing onto Cour St-Pierre; the two square towers above the east end are totally different, and between them rises a curious greenish steeple added in the late nineteenth century. When you walk in the church, you are met with the clean lines of gloomy, severely hard stonework. In 1535 the people of Geneva accepted the Reformation and embarked on a rampage. All the altars in the cathedral along with all the statues and icons were destroyed, the organs were smashed and the painted decoration on the interior walls was whitewashed. Only the massive pulpit and the stained glass of the chancel survived.



As we walked through the interior architecture, your eye is drawn up to the only decoration to survive the length of the clustered pillars, grotesque monsters and a bare-breasted double-tailed mermaid. Copies of the only fifteenth-century frescoes that survived the Reformation – angels playing musical instruments – are on the ornamented vaults of the chancel (the area around the alter).  The cathedral is built on the remains of occupation going back to the Romans: the first church, just north of the present cathedral, has been dated to around 350 AD. From then on, the hill on which the cathedral stands was the site of almost constant building and rebuilding.

Archeologists have been working to expose walls, rooms and mosaic floors beneath the cathedral since 1976, and the huge site is open to the public pretty rarefied stuff but exceptionally labeled, subterranean long narrow walkway winding around and over the crumbling remains. With more than 200 levels of building work so far discovered in eleven zones, it’s hard to figure out exactly what’s going on, but the free audios help.