Rooster statue found in debris
A WROUGHT copper statue of a rooster that sat atop NotreDame has been found “battered” in the debris, France’s culture ministry said.
The statue is considered all the more important because it contains three holy relics, including a fragment of the Crown of Thorns believed by Christians to have been worn by Jesus Christ during his crucifixion, placed there to protect Parisians.
The sculpture of the bird, which is an unofficial symbol of France, was recovered on Tuesday by a restorer picking through the rubble left when the spire on which it had sat toppled at the height of the inferno that ravaged Notre-Dame on Monday, a ministry spokesman said.
The head of the French Builders Federation, Jacques Chanut, posted a picture of the restorer holding a green-colored rooster statue in the street.
The ministry spokesman said the statue had been handed over to religious officials, without elaborating.
A ministry official separately told Le Parisien newspaper that the statue was “battered but apparently restorable.”
The official was quoted saying that, when the 19th-century spire had collapsed into the cathedral, the rooster statue had detached “and fallen on the good side ... away from the seat of the fire.”
(AFP)