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PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOMAS VAN HOUTRYVE
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By Kristin Romey, Senior Archaeology Editor and Writer
On the night of August 15, 2019, a Nat Geo editor, Rob Kunzig, was in a taxi stopped in a Parisian traffic jam over the Seine. “Is Notre Dame burning?” his wife asked, as she looked out the window.
Moments later, flames engulfed the iconic spire of the beloved medieval cathedral. Like so many others in Paris on that spring night, Kunzig watched the conflagration in horror. Nearly 20 years earlier, he had the rare opportunity to explore the “forest” of the cathedral, a vast attic latticed with enormous ancient oak beams. Now the burning roof cast a terrible orange glow into the sky. Had France—and the world—lost Notre Dame?
Absolutely not, reports Kunzig in his February cover story for National Geographic. A little more than a year after he watched the cathedral burn, Kunzig was back in the attic of Notre Dame, exploring the damaged interior with experts leading the multiyear restoration. But his story, with stunning photos and video by Tomas van Houtryve, also takes us to the constellation of people and resources around the cathedral—the conservators, engineers, laboratories, and even forests— that are critical to bringing it back. Van Houtryve used digital scans of 19th-century photo technology for the images of a chimera (below left), and Amélie Strack (below right) who tested a new laser technique in cleaning and bringing back two side chapels.
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