It was a day that would go down in history. As Parisians were streaming out of their work places on April 15, 2019 – joining the rush hour parade to scutter home or pick up their children from school – dark hues of reddish orange and plumes of smoke filled the sky. Notre-Dame de Paris, the landmark cathedral in the heart of the city, was burning.
Read moreWorld ‘watches and weeps’ as Notre-Dame burns
The blaze gutted the landmark, destroying the roof and causing the steeple to collapse. In the aftermath of the disaster, images from inside Notre-Dame showed its immense walls standing sturdily with statues still in place and a gleaming golden cross above the altar – and the floor covered in charred rubble from the fallen roof. Entire sections of vaulting at the top of the structure had collapsed. And although the bell towers and most of the iconic circular stained-glass windows remained intact, the damage left France reeling in shock.
What came next was a rocky five-year road to restoration that required monumental efforts. Around 250 companies and hundreds of artisans, architects and other experts got down to brass tacks to reconstruct Notre-Dame – with costs reaching into the hundreds of millions of euros. There was also the Covid-19 pandemic, which caused significant delays.
Works eventually resumed in 2021 with skilled carpenters, glassmakers and stonemasons rolling up their sleeves to toil across the cathedral site and workshops in France and beyond.
A masterpiece of Gothic architecture and a UNESCO World Heritage site, the iconic cathedral is now set to reopen its doors on December 7 and 8.
But this may not have been possible without the help of skilled craftsmen and -women from all over the world who pulled their weight in the reconstruction efforts.
Johan Deblieck, the Belgian organ builder
Though the main organ of Notre-Dame was in large part spared by the flames, it was covered in soot and damaged by humidity. This was an “absolute miracle”, according to Olivier Latry, one of its main players.
It has now been fully cleaned but it will take six months of harmonisation before its 8,000 pipes recover their full sound potential.
In the meantime, the star of the show will get a little sibling, thanks to organ builder Johan Deblieck.
Read moreSpared from fire, Notre-Dame’s organ set for lengthy restoration
Based in Lennik, a municipality southwest of Brussels, Belgium, Deblieck opened his workshop in 1993 and has become a global authority on “positives” – small pipe organs built to be more or less mobile. Hardly higher than a piano, these instruments have been used in religious functions since the Middle Ages.
In January 2023, he received a phone call that he said he would never forget. “I was asked if I would be interested in crafting a positive organ [for Notre-Dame] … and I was surprised by this question being asked on a simple phone call,” Deblieck recalled. He accepted the commission and was given a deadline for the end of October 2024.
Aside from being entrusted in 2020 with building an organ for the Bach-Archiv, a cultural institution in Germany dedicated to the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, Deblieck said the Notre-Dame order was “one of the most beautiful” he had received.
“There is nothing more prestigious than Notre-Dame de Paris,” Deblieck said. “I was shaken for three weeks.”
The organ he crafted for Notre-Dame comprises just over 200 pipes and measures 1.25 by 1.15 metres. “It has wheels and can be moved around easily, but it is intended to be placed at the very front of the church where the choir is,” explained Deblieck. His instrument will join the great rood screen organ and the choir organ in the cathedral, serving its purpose by accompanying services and choirs for years to come.
When the positive organ sounds, Deblieck explained, “there is a sort of alchemy that occurs between the sounds that emanate from it and the person who plays it.” But he said the true magic happens when it is used for improvisation, a talent he believes Latry masters.
In two weeks time, Deblieck will travel down to Paris to deliver the organ himself. “I think it is going to be a strange and surreal moment,” he admitted.
Will Gusakov, the American timber framer
Will Gusakov found out about Notre-Dame catching fire in 2019 when a friend of his from Paris sent him a photo. “I was incredulous,” he recalled. “How could that possibly be happening?” he remembered asking himself.
Gusakov is a craftsman who runs a timber framing company in Vermont, USA. His journey to eventually joining in the effort to rebuild Notre-Dame began with Carpenters Without Borders, an organisation based in France made up of traditional woodworkers who volunteer to restore unique constructions like moat bridges in Normandy or vernacular houses in China.
The tight-knit community spoke about what was going to happen to this pivotal architectural heritage that had been lost and brainstormed on how they could contribute. Two French companies with knowledge of the centuries-old carpentry methods used to build Notre-Dame in the 13th century were eventually chosen to lead the project. Traditional carpenter Loïc Desmonts, based in Normandy, would rebuild the nave woodwork alongside Ateliers Perrault, a company in western France specialising in historical monuments.
But they couldn’t do it alone, so the tight-knit community from Carpenters Without Borders stepped in to help, including Gusakov. He packed up and moved to rural Normany for six months with his wife and two young children, ready to pause life in Vermont to take part in this mammoth task. More than 1,000 centuries-old oaks would have to be felled to build the nave and the choir, with another 800 for Notre-Dame’s spire alone. Each beam would be shaped by hand axe into its necessary rectangular form. “I was worried that I was being very selfish, but my wife was very supportive,” he admitted.
“It was better than a dream,” Gusakov remembered.
A dream that required a lot of hard work, he later admitted. For the last three months of his time at the Desmonts atelier, Gusakov was the shop lead for figuring out the principal trusses. “They are the roof triangles that hold up the roof and the principal ones really carry the loads. In the nave roof there is 11 of them and they are very cool. For a timber framer, they are very sexy,” he laughed.
“But the rebuild was incredibly complex because we were basically making a replica of the frame as it has been down to every single individual piece, of which there were hundreds slightly different than the next,” Gusakov explained. “We were reproducing all the idiosyncrasies.”
The final result stands as proof that these centuries-old techniques and manual tools have stood the test of time. But also that these methods are still efficient.
“How many kids staring at their iPads are even aware that they can grow up to be a stonecutter, a traditional carpenter, a mason?” Gusakov’s colleague Hank Silver told the New York Times in an interview.
Though he will not be attending the opening ceremony, Gusakov hopes to travel to France in March with his family to visit friends and see his work.
“There will be a kind of reconnection there,” he said of the trip. “I feel excited and proud that the building will be open to the public again.”
Stefan Lücking, the German glass painter
One of the treasures of the Notre-Dame cathedral was its stained-glass windows, which escaped significant damage. However, the fire blackened many of the windows, which required them to be dismantled and restored to their former glory. That is where Stefan Lücking stepped in.
He remembers watching TV at home with his family when news of the Notre-Dame fire came on. “My daughter said, ‘Oh, maybe you could work on fixing the windows?’” he recalled, laughing at the precision of her prophecy.
“I didn’t believe it at the time, but one or two years later, we got a call [asking if he could] work on Notre-Dame,” Lücking smiled.
Four stained-glass windows from the burnt landmark were shipped to Germany, two of which landed in the hands of Lücking and his partner Stephan Lübbers, both professional glass painters. Based in Borchen, the craftsmen spent between the summer of 2022 and September of 2024 restoring two 72-metre squared windows. They spent endless hours clearing off the charred glass and putting together the pieces that had been broken from the dismantlement.
“The windows were in a better condition than we thought they would be,” he said. But it was a lot of work. “We had to use silicone glue to put back the broken pieces that were all different shapes and sizes, between three and twenty centimetres.”
Along with two other glass workers from Cologne, Lücking and his partner travelled to Paris to install the window frames in January 2023. A few months later, they went back to install the windows and then again in September 2024 to remove the protection in front of the windows.
“It was very impressive to see the cathedral from those angles, to have those views, and to see everyone working. I think there were around 400 or 500 people at the cathedral [when we visited],” he recalled.
“It was overwhelming,” Lücking admitted, aware of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “We were sure we would never see the cathedral like that again.”
He hopes to visit the cathedral when the crowds of tourists quell over time, perhaps in the summer of 2025.
The grand reopening is expected to bring 14 to 15 million visitors to Notre-Dame annually, surpassing the 12 million who visited in 2017.
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