20 Cathedral Secrets Most Visitors Walk Right Past

A battered old door in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland, tells the story of a feud between two powerful Irish families. In 1492, the FitzGeralds and the Butlers fought over which family would control the country. The FitzGeralds defeated the Butler leader, who retreated to the chapter house of the cathedral and barricaded his troops inside. The Butler leader refused to negotiate with his rival, Gerald FitzGerald, so FitzGerald ordered his men to cut a hole in the door and thrust his bare arm through it. The Butler leader shook FitzGerald’s hand, ending the siege. The saying “to chance your arm” supposedly came from this incident.

By 1905, Winchester Cathedral in Hampshire, England, had been there for 900 years, but it was sinking. The cathedral’s medieval timber foundations were rotting away in waterlogged peat. Pumping the water out would have risked collapsing the soft ground below, so engineer Francis Fox came up with an underpinning plan and hired deep-sea diver William Walker to do the work under his direction. Walker worked six hours a day in total darkness underwater for six years, hand-packing hundreds of thousands of bricks and concrete blocks under the walls. The cathedral held, and it still stands.

A statue atop Milan Cathedral in Lombardy, Italy, is named La Legge Nuova (“The New Law”) and dates from 1810. Carved by the Italian sculptor Camillo Pacetti, the work depicts a robed woman holding a torch aloft and wearing a spiked crown above the cathedral’s main portal. Around 70 years later, French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi came up with a very similar pose for the Statue of Liberty. Though there is no evidence that Bartholdi was ever aware of Pacetti’s work, scholars remain divided on whether it might have had an impact.

Deep within the confines of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, Italy, lies a statue carved out of porphyry called the Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs. This statue is a portrait of four Roman co-emperors and was made around 300 AD. Venetian crusaders stole it from Constantinople in 1204, though they lost part of a heel, which remained in what is now Turkey. The rest of the statue sat on a plaster foot for over 700 years until archaeologists found the missing piece while excavating in Istanbul, and it fit perfectly.

In 1598, Bishop William Cotton had an old oak door at Exeter Cathedral in Devon, England, cut open with a tiny arched hole near its base. This door was part of the cathedral’s medieval astronomical clock. The clock used animal fat as a lubricant and attracted mice who ate the ropes and gears. The hole let the resident cats, which were given a small stipend to cover their expenses, come and go to hunt down vermin. People often link this spot to the nursery rhyme Hickory Dickory Dock, though that tradition remains unproven.

The entrance doors of the Portal of Saint Anne at Notre-Dame de Paris, France, feature intricate wrought-iron scrollwork created by a locksmith named Biscornet. His work was so elaborate that other smiths in the 13th century were reportedly unable to reproduce it. According to legend, Biscornet sold his soul to the devil to complete the ironwork overnight. Much of his original work survives today.

High up on a granite column within Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in Galicia, Spain, which is one of the major pilgrimage sites of medieval Christendom, sits a small stone-carved image of a smiling man holding some foliage. The figure was carved while the cathedral was being constructed in the Romanesque style, about 42 feet above the floor of the nave. The art historian Jennifer Alexander noticed it when she was doing a survey of the cathedral stone by stone. She thought it must be a secret self-portrait by one of the masons, signed in a hidden place where no one but fellow builders would ever find it. No documentary evidence has been found to identify him, so we will never know his name.

The Sanctuary Knocker from the North Door of Durham Cathedral, County Durham, England, is a grotesque bronze face holding a ring. The original is kept in the cathedral’s treasury, and a copy hangs on the door today. In medieval England, anyone fleeing for a crime such as murder or theft was permitted to get to a church door and knock on it to gain 37 days of sanctuary under the power of Saint Cuthbert, an early English saint associated with the cathedral. Monks watched from above and summoned guards who were not to arrest the criminal until the 37 days had passed.

Chartres Cathedral in France has a large stone circle, about 42 feet wide, on the floor of its nave. This is a labyrinth that workers made of blue and white limestone around 1200. It has only one winding path with no dead ends. In medieval times, people couldn’t always visit Jerusalem on a pilgrimage, so this symbolized the path for them. On most Sundays, there are rows of chairs where people sit to hear the service, and this covers up the labyrinth path from most people. In the 19th century, a custom developed where people would crawl on their knees along the labyrinth, although older sources say they would walk the path.

Architect Christopher Wren’s 112-foot-wide Whispering Gallery at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London allows you to whisper from one side and have your words heard from the opposite side. The smooth plaster surface and precise curve of the dome enable the whisper to travel around the wall. It was not an intended eavesdropping device. It just happened because of the shape. The physicist Lord Rayleigh would later use the Whispering Gallery in developing his theory of sound waves.

El Transparente, a colossal Baroque altarpiece by sculptor/architect Narciso Tomé, sits behind the main altar of Toledo Cathedral in Castile-La Mancha, Spain. The medieval passage behind the altar was once shrouded in darkness, so Tome set iron bars into the stone roof and chiseled an oval skylight directly through the heavy medieval vaulting across from the altar. Carved angels and gilded rays frame the aperture, and it continues to channel daylight down onto the altarpiece today, all without artificial illumination.

In the vicinity of the principal entryway of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, Austria, you will find two 15th-century iron rods in the wall that were official measuring standards used by cloth merchants in the adjacent marketplace. Nearby, a groove in the stone is commonly referred to as a bread gauge, a standard used to check the size of loaves sold in the market, but a recent inspection by the cathedral’s building office revealed that it was caused merely by the friction of an iron hook that secured a Rococo gate removed in 1880.

On one of the ceilings inside Seville Cathedral’s Puerta del Lagarto in Seville, Andalusia, Spain, is a full-size wooden model of a crocodile called El Lagarto (“The Lizard”). In 1260, the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt sent King Alfonso X of Castile an ambassador and a gift, which consisted of a live Nile crocodile, among other things. The gift was an attempt to arrange a marriage between the sultan and Alfonso’s daughter. The crocodile, meanwhile, lived out its life in Seville. When it died, the cathedral woodcarvers made a substitute out of wood.

The Witch of Girona can be found near the Bell Tower of Charlemagne on the high northern wall of Girona Cathedral in Catalonia, Spain. Created in the 14th century, the statue is the only human-shaped gargoyle on the building. It features a woman in a tunic carrying a scroll. Like the rest of the gargoyles on the building, it serves as a waterspout, draining rain off the cathedral roof via her gaping mouth. Locals claim the Witch of Girona was once an actual woman who hurled stones at the cathedral and was turned to stone as punishment, condemned to spew water forever.

The Chichester Reliefs are set into the wall of the choir aisle of Chichester Cathedral in West Sussex, England. They are two deep stone reliefs, carved with a scene of Christ in Bethany and the Raising of Lazarus, telling the biblical story of Jesus resurrecting a dead man. They were likely concealed behind elaborate wood paneling by cathedral clergy in the 16th or 17th centuries, during a period of religious turmoil, to prevent their destruction. They remained hidden until the wood paneling was removed 200 years later, and they were rediscovered by workmen, still almost intact.

High in the Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral in Lincolnshire, England, hangs a 12-inch grotesque of stone. It’s known as the Lincoln Imp, a hairy, horned figure with a mischievous grin, carved around 1280 by Gothic masons to warn pilgrims against the danger of sin. Folklore in Victorian times claimed that the creature was actually a real demon, petrified by a group of angels. Now, a spotlight shines constantly on the Imp. The little fellow is the civic symbol of Lincoln.

In 1330, the massive stone tower tacked onto the end of the cathedral in Wells, Somerset, England, was sinking into the soggy earth, and large fissures had appeared in the nave’s piers. William Joy, the master mason in charge of the project, designed the Scissor Arches. They are gigantic double arches that intersect in hourglass-like forms to brace the sagging piers and bind the building as a whole. The repair held. Almost 700 years on, the tower is still standing, and the arches are one of the cathedral’s finest features.

Perched high on the north wall of Florence Cathedral in Tuscany, Italy, near the Porta della Mandorla, is the carved marble head of a bull. According to architectural historians, it commemorates the thousands of oxen that hauled marble and timber to the site. But according to a popular tale from the Renaissance, an angry stonemason carved the bull’s horns pointing toward the shop of a local baker to get back at him. The baker had informed the local authorities that the stonemason was having an affair with the baker’s wife.

For hundreds of years, 13 white geese have roamed free within the cloisters of Barcelona Cathedral in Catalonia, Spain, which is also known as the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia. This tradition celebrates Saint Eulalia, who was allegedly martyred in Barcelona at the age of 13 in the 4th century by Roman emperor Diocletian. She is said to have endured 13 different forms of torture for practicing Christianity, so the 13 geese are symbolic of her age, and the white feathers represent her purity.

The stone columns in the crypt and side chapels of Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, England, are covered in thousands of medieval inscriptions. When pilgrims came to the shrine of the murdered archbishop Thomas Becket, whom the church had canonized as a saint, they marked their visit in a variety of ways: by scratching outlines of their shoe soles, carving ships to wish them safe passage on the high seas, or cutting hexfoil “witch marks” that they thought could protect them from evil. For the medieval clergy, these graffiti were not acts of vandalism but expressions of piety.

This content was created with the help of AI.