Sunday, December 23, 2012

Christmas remembrances card featuring Strasbourg Cathedral


This "Christmas Remembrances" card features a piece of orange yarn and an illustration by an artist named Rosenberg of Strasbourg Cathedral in Strasbourg, France.

On the inside of the card is the following caption:
Strasbourg .. Alsace, France

Beyond the roofs on these old world houses the artist has stretched the tower of the Strasbourg Cathedral.

Here is housed the famous clock, four stories high where the hours are announced by the twelve apostles and where other sacred characters appear at certain intervals accompanied by a beautiful carillon of chimes.
And the card is signed by "Truman family" (probably not this Truman family, though).

Here are some additional images of the card, which has no other identifying information:




And here are some additional facts about Strasbourg Cathedral, courtesy of Wikipedia:
  • In French it is called Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-Strasbourg.
  • In German it is called Liebfrauenmünster zu Straßburg.
  • Its construction took from 1015 to 1439.
  • At 466 feet, it was the world's tallest building from 1647 to 1874.1 It remains the highest still-standing structure built entirely in the Middle Ages.
  • The cathedral was damaged by British and American air raids in August 1944. The last of those damages were not repaired until the early 1990s.
  • The cathedral houses an astronomical clock, which is one of the largest in the world.
There is also this interesting tidbit from Wikipedia:
"One legend says that the building rests on immense piles of oak sinking into the waters of an underground lake. A boat would roam around the lake, without anyone inside, though the noise of the oars could be heard nevertheless. According to the legend, the entry to the underground lake could be found in the cellar of a house just opposite the cathedral. It would have been walled up a few centuries ago."
Footnote
1. Strasbourg Cathedral ascended to the title of the world's tallest building in 1647 when the spire of St. Mary's Church in Stralsund, Germany, was destroyed by a lightning strike.

2 comments:

  1. Orange yarn? Does it look original to the card? I wonder when red and green Christmas colors first became the norm?

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  2. The original has a yellow satin ribbon bow, not orange yarn. I have a set of ten, all by different location cathedrals, by same artist, with different colors of ribbon bows. Would like to discover more about the artist; these are lovely!

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