Notre Dame will be reopened in one month and there will be some ceremonies and celebrations starting from December 7.
The bells of Notre Dame rang for the first time on Friday since the fire in 2019 that endangered the Parisian cathedral. French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to restore the historic cathedral within five years when it was burning.
“Five years ago, a promise: to restore Notre-Dame Cathedral as one,” Macron said on X Friday. “Today, its bells are finally ringing thanks to the extraordinary work of so many of you.”
The video that Macron posted along with the message looked like showing the installation and ringing of some of the bells of Notre Dame. Notre Dame will be open in a month, and there are plans for ceremonies and celebrations to start on December 7.
The landmark also has three new bells, one of which tolled at the Stade de France during the 2024 Paris Olympics and is engraved with the words “Paris 2024.”
The other two bells, Chiara and Carlos, are comparatively much smaller, and were rung on Thursday along with the Olympic bell. All together there are 21 bells in Notre Dame and each of them has its name of important figure of the church.
Notre Dame’s bells have been cleaning since the fire on the roof and spire on April 15, 2019, and other damages to the cathedral.
Restoring Notre Dame needed workers with special skills that are rare to find and tools that are made on site and are similar to those used by the workers who constructed Notre Dame many centuries ago.
It also needed 2,000 Oak trees from different forests in Europe which took between 12 and 19 months to dry before the wood was used in the construction.
The ambitious restoration project was projected to cost $760 million. However, according to Rebuilding Notre Dame de Paris, the public entity overseeing the cathedral’s conservation, over 340,000 donors from more than 150 countries contributed more than $900 million to the cause.
