Paris and its sights (churches and cathedrals) are an addition.
Today, the NTN TV channel once again shows the film "The Da Vinci Code" based on the bestseller by D. Brown and there were questions about the previous review from Matveika - I decided to add about the Saint-Sulpice church.
The initiator of the construction of the church of Saint-Sulpice was Jean-Jacques-Olier, the priest of the district and the founder of the seminary and the religious congregation of Saint-Sulpice, a memorial plaque was installed in the church (see photo).
Light enters the church only through stained-glass windows and windows, which gives it a special mystery that we felt when we visited it in the evening.
Inside the church there is an obelisk made of white marble and a gnomon (the so-called sundial index column).
A copper strip soldered into a gray granite floor slab, laid from north to south, is called the Rose line. The rays of the sun entering the hole in the south wall move along this line, marking the time from solstice to solstice.
For centuries, the Rose symbol has been associated with maps and travel guides. The Rose Compass, featured on almost every map, marked where north, east, south, and west were. Originally known as the wind rose, it indicated the direction of thirty-two winds, including eight major, eight half and sixteen quaternary. Diagrammed as a circle, these thirty-two compass needles were exactly the same as the traditional depiction of a thirty-two petal rose flower.
On the globe, the line of the Rose was called the zero meridian or longitude - it was an imaginary line drawn from the North Pole to the South. Now the zero meridian is located in London, in Greenwich. But he wasn't always there.
Long before the adoption of the zero meridian at Greenwich, zero longitude passed through Paris, exactly through the premises of the church of Saint-Sulpice. And a copper strip built into the floor served as evidence of this, reminded that it was here that the main earth meridian ran. And although in 1888 Greenwich took away this honor from Paris, the original, very first line of the Rose has survived to this day.
And the square in front of Saint-Sulpice is decorated with the "Fountain of the Four Bishops" - the famous theologians of the 17th-18th centuries Jean-Baptiste Massillon, Valentin Flechier, Francois Fenlon and Jacques-Binine Bossuet - a favorite place for philosophers and intellectuals.
