Finally the update for our tour of the Saint-Gatien cathedral. I can see the towers from outside my bedroom window, it's only a couple blocks away from where we live. Obviously, it's under a lot of reparations and such, and it was also another rainy day, so the pictures aren't the best.

The front facade. This is a little far away and blurry, but if you look closely you'll see that the two towers are actually quite different in design. Apparently there were two different architects working on the cathedral and they hated each other. So they each designed a tower and refused to do anything like the other one.


In this picture you have more evidence of the mix-n-match town of Tours. Haha. The cathedral was designed and built from an older church. So you can see in this picture the plainer walls and then the decorative columns and such added to it.
The flying buttresses, which were also a later addition after they realized the cathedral was starting to fall down without them. The fact that it was built over several hundred years means it profited from a lot of different research.

Absolutely breathtaking.

The organ

Me looking reallllllllllly tiny! Anyway, like I said the cathedral was built over a time span of a couple hundred years and that is evidenced a lot in the architecture. There were lots of pretty amazing differences of how they started changing styles and techniques as they learned more about the mechanics of how the building stood up. Even the stained glass windows changed in the style and content. I took lots of pictures, however, the lighting was rather poor and few turned out.

More to come soon!