20 Famous Churches Hiding Bizarre Secrets In Plain Sight

Crowds queue to insert their hands into the Bocca della Verità, a stone disk cut in the 1st century AD and set into the porch of the basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in 1632. According to a medieval legend, it would bite off the hand of anyone caught lying. But it’s actually just a solid slab of marble, probably part of a Roman drain cover or fountain in the shape of a river god. Weighing about 2,200 pounds, it shot to fame after a starring role in the 1953 movie “Roman Holiday.”

This guy, named Le Stryge, sits on a high gallery of Notre-Dame de Paris, chin resting on his hands, tongue sticking out, and looking ancient. He isn’t. He was designed by architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the 1840s and sculpted by Victor Pyanet during a restoration that followed the publication of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.” And because he doesn’t have a spout to drain water, he is, technically speaking, a chimera, a decorative grotesque, not a gargoyle.

A wooden ladder sits on a window ledge on the upper story of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, first mentioned in an engraving dated 1728. The church is controlled by six Christian denominations. An Ottoman Sultan’s decree in 1757, reaffirmed in 1852, has meant that all property and furnishings in shared areas must remain unchanged unless all six denominations agree. Thus, the ladder has remained where it was for almost 300 years, with only a few instances when it was moved temporarily for repairs.

In the Milan Cathedral, there is a statue from 1562 of Saint Bartholomew, one of Jesus’s 12 apostles, who was believed to have been martyred by being flayed. Marco d’Agrate sculpted him so that his muscles, veins, and tendons were laid bare, his skin thrown over his shoulder like a cape. D’Agrate modeled his work on anatomical drawings published in books like the anatomist Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica. The result is not only a sculpture but also an exercise in Renaissance anatomy.

On top of one of the pillars in Lincoln Cathedral’s Angel Choir (built starting in 1256) is a grinning, horned, cross-legged, 12-inch-tall stone figure, dated about 1280. According to a 14th-century story, an angel turned this imp into stone for making fun of the choir and breaking all the chairs. Whether true or not, the little imp became the symbol of Lincoln, appearing on town coats of arms and on the crest of the local football team.

The four emperors embracing in a circle appear as a purple stone statue set into an outer wall of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Carved around 300 AD, the statue was torn from a building in Constantinople in 1204 by Venice during the sack led by Doge Enrico Dandolo. The foot of one emperor broke off and remained in Constantinople. Venice patched the gap with plain white stone. In 1965, archaeologists excavating in Istanbul unearthed the original porphyry foot, which remains there today.

Carved into the wall next to the main entrance of Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral are the symbols “O5.” When the Nazis annexed Austria and forbade the use of the country’s name (Österreich), the Austrian underground resistance began chiseling the symbol late in the war, using the letter O as the first letter of Österreich and five to stand for E, the fifth letter of the alphabet. A subversive declaration that Austria continued to exist, the inscription is now covered by glass.

On a flying buttress of the Freiburg Minster, Germany, built from about 1300 to 1330, a crouching figure has pulled up his tunic and exposed his bottom to the public square below, his tunic acting as a funnel for the rain water to drain from his behind. Since water actually flows through it, it is a genuine gargoyle. According to local legend, the masons positioned him that way to mock the town council after a pay dispute, although there were many similar crude or mocking sculptures on Gothic cathedrals.

Inlaid into the nave floor of Chartres Cathedral in France circa 1200 is a 42-foot circular labyrinth with a single winding path that is 964 feet long and has no dead ends, so it’s not a maze. Pilgrims unable to make it to the Holy Land walked or crawled the labyrinth as a surrogate pilgrimage. Clergy danced along it, tossing a leather ball at Easter. During the French Revolution, the bronze plate in the center of the labyrinth was melted down to make cannonballs.

Near the bottom of the Gothic entranceway to Genoa’s 13th-century Cathedral of San Lorenzo lies the stone image of a dog sleeping, worn smooth at eye level by centuries of people rubbing it for good luck. It is said that the sculptor’s favorite dog accompanied him while he worked on the cathedral from 1230 to 1300. When the dog died, the master carver sculpted its likeness to remember it. There’s no evidence to confirm the tale, but passersby still stop to touch the dog.

Aachen Cathedral in Germany, built for Emperor Charlemagne, has bronze doors with lion-head handles. Inside one of the lions’ mouths is a strange thumb-shaped lump of metal. According to legend, people from the town managed to trick the Devil into paying for the building of the cathedral by promising him the first soul to walk through the door, but instead they let a wolf enter. Furious, the Devil slammed the door on his way out, snapping his thumb off. The bump is actually just a mistake in casting, or a piece of the locking mechanism, but there is still a real ancient Roman bronze statue of a wolf standing nearby.

On a corner wall of Notre-Dame de Dijon in France, added during work on the chapel in the late 1400s, there’s a little stone owl worn smooth by centuries of touching. No one knows why it was carved. Perhaps it was a mason’s signature or a symbol of wisdom, but by at least the 1700s, people were convinced that rubbing it with your left hand and making a wish would bring good luck. It’s now the official emblem of the city of Dijon.

High on the Duomo of Florence, near the Porta della Mandorla, a 15th-century marble bull’s head looks down toward a street below. According to the cathedral records, it commemorates the oxen used to transport marble up the hill during the construction of the famous dome. There is also a popular tale that a carpenter who’d had an affair with a baker’s wife carved the bull pointing at the baker’s shop after the baker took him to court, with horns serving as a common insult aimed at a cuckolded husband. But the record says it was for the oxen.

In France’s Autun Cathedral, the sculptor Gislebertus carved a stone capital around 1120 with Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, hanging from a tree and two demons pulling on the ropes. This scene was meant as a caution against giving in to despair. When the central tower of the church was repaired in the 19th century, the workmen took the capital down and moved it to the cathedral’s upstairs Chapter House, where it now hangs at eye level. What you see high above your head in the nave today is a 19th-century replica.

Deep in the crypt of Lund Cathedral in Sweden, consecrated in 1123, stands a giant gripping a stone column beside a smaller female figure. A fairy tale recounts how the giant, named Finn, was commissioned by Saint Lawrence, the cathedral’s patron saint, to build the cathedral in exchange for the sun, the moon, or Lawrence’s eyes. Finn became stone while falling after Lawrence shouted his name while the building was coming down. Art historians interpret this statue as Samson from the Bible, pulling the roof down on Philistine temples.

In the churchyard at St. Olave’s Church on Seething Lane in London, where the diarist Samuel Pepys attended services, the churchyard gate has three human skulls carved into the stone and fixed underneath the iron spikes, with the date “April 11, 1658” inscribed below them. It was a memento mori to remind people of their own mortality and encourage them to pray. That would make it seven years before the plague swept through London, killing more than 300 people who were buried in the churchyard. Dickens called the church “St. Ghastly Grim.”

From 1480 to 1500, local artisans at Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk began carving small satirical tableaux called misericords into the underside of the church’s folding choir seats, or rather, the little benches on which the choir monks could perch when the liturgy became too long for them to stand. They included a few depictions of people excreting money, along with various Dutch proverbs. During the Iconoclastic Fury of 1566, when Protestant reformers smashed all the saints and images and altars and religious paraphernalia throughout the city, these carvings were left alone because they weren’t visible.

The stone leaves at the window of Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland (built from 1446 to 1484) include carvings that look like ears of corn and aloe vera, which are native to the Americas, even though the chapel was finished years before Columbus’s voyage in 1492. One theory has it that the grandfather of the chapel’s builder set sail for North America in 1398 and came back with descriptions of American plants. Botanists and art historians say, however, that the carvings depict European varieties of wheat or wild strawberries, done in the typical Gothic style of the time.

Pope Alexander VII’s tomb in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, which was completed in 1678, sits above a door that is still in use. Priests walk out of the basilica through it. The sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini didn’t cover the door with his tomb. He handled the obstacle by adding a heavy red stone curtain raised by a skeleton in bronze (not bone) holding up an hourglass over the kneeling figure of the pope in prayer. It’s considered to be Bernini’s last great masterpiece.

A statue of Saint Denis, a third-century bishop who was beheaded by the Romans, holding his own severed head, stands on the west front of the Cathedral Basilica of Saint-Denis outside Paris. The basilica was built between 1135 and 1144, and its construction is generally seen as the beginning of Gothic architecture. According to hagiography, after Roman authorities beheaded him, his body picked up its head and walked roughly six miles north, preaching, before finally collapsing where the basilica now stands.

This content was created with the help of AI.