"Le Stryge" Chimera atop Notre-Dame Cathedral, Paris 1989 - Buy at https://bobbex.smugmug.com/

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There are hundreds of grotesques on the Notre Dame. The best-known chimera, le Stryge, is on an upper balcony and overlooks the city.

The strix (plural striges or strixes), in the mythology of classical antiquity, was a bird of ill omen, the product of metamorphosis, that fed on human flesh and blood. It also referred to witches and related malevolent folkloric beings. The strix is described as a large-headed bird with transfixed eyes, rapacious beak, greyish white wings and hooked claws in Ovid's Fasti.This is the only thorough description of the strix in Classical literature.
Gargoyles have been viewed alternately as a concept of evil or as elements that scared evil spirits away from the church.

Much of the church’s religious imagery was destroyed in the 1790s during the French Revolution. In 1845, Architect Eugene Violet-le-Duc began extensive restoration to the cathedral, returning it to its original Gothic state. It took 25 years to complete.

Violet-le-Duc also added the chimeras, guardian demons. They are mythical or grotesque figures that some often describe as gargoyles. He wrote that restoration is a “means to re-establish (a building) to a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time.”

Taken in: France / Île-de-France / Paris / Quartier de Notre-Dame (show map)

Taken on: March 1, 1989

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