Vézelay, the day when light works miracles

Vézelay, the day when light works miracles. Whether you're a believer or not, a churchgoer or not, on that day at VézelayAt the summer solstice, everyone wants to believe it.

You don't have to be a frog, an anchorite touched by grace, or even a pilgrim on the road to Compostela to hear yourself muttering, almost without realising it, this anguished prayer, this feverish incantation of the average tourist who stubbornly repeats: "I hope the weather's fine!

21 June, the summer solstice,

In truth, anyone can implore heaven. A special kind of faith assails those who approach the town of Vézelay, in the Yonne region, this "boat that has dropped anchor", as the writer Paul Claudel, a believer among believers, so eloquently put it: a faith that leads us to believe that someone up there will manage to ensure that the light is at its zenith, at the appointed hour.

Then, as solar noon approaches (2pm on our clocks), the "eternal hill" will once again deliver its lesson in aesthetics. The same one every year for ten centuries.

This lunchtime, the air is boiling hot, the sky a beautiful cerulean blue. The wheat is roasting all around, waiting for the harvester, and the vines, undulating over the hilly land, are already turning purple.

Light at the summer solstice

"The light will be there",

Christopher Kelly murmurs in relief. It's not his first solstice, far from it, but he wouldn't miss it for the world. This Englishman arrived here around fifteen years ago, on 21 June. And what he experienced that day no doubt explains why he never left.

He works at the Maison du Visitor, an association set up by enthusiasts who offer the most curious visitors the chance to take the time to decipher the city's architecture, its sacred symbolism and its still unsolved mysteries.

But there's no question of lingering for the moment...

The midday sun doesn't wait, and it's time to begin the tough climb up to the entrance of the basilica dedicated to Mary Magdalene.

Once up there, you first enter the dark narthex, the vestibule where pilgrims once left their belongings. There's no time to be mesmerised by the extraordinary central tympanum that welcomed them, with its majestic Christ clad in a spiral stone drapery, and its finely sculpted half-vault that recounts, like a medieval ephemeris, the agricultural work that punctuates the year.

In the church, the great Romanesque nave, a beautiful corridor of perfect proportions (sixty metres long by nine metres wide and eighteen metres high), is already bathed in a misty glow, as if to prepare the visitor's retina.

The perspective of the columns, the capitals and the two-tone arches,

Everything here works together to guide the eye towards the back, towards this Gothic-style choir, whose whiteness is already ethereal. All that's left to do is stand in the centre of the nave and wait feverishly for the great moment: the moment when the purest rays strike the southern flank of the basilica, hitting each of the side windows as expected and passing through them with such force that they turn into sparkling halos that come to rest like angels on the bistre floor.

At the same moment, pools of light seemed to pour down from the sky. In all, nine white spots on the blotting paper of the paving. At the end of the day, each sliver of light aligns itself perfectly, tracing a straight line from the entrance to the nave to the choir. "To witness this spectacle is to perceive the genius of Vézelay," murmurs Christopher Kelly.

It also means meeting its enigma:

How could medieval builders have conceived such a feat? The nave, the oldest part of the basilica, was built between 1120 and 1140, after an earlier building burnt down.

West-east orientation, from sunset to sunrise. Measured according to the precepts of divine proportion, so dear to Pythagoras, for an effect of total harmony.

Above all, there is a constant interplay between shadow and natural light. Throughout the year, the sun's rays move and move this place. Right up until the summer solstice, when the wonder of alignment takes place for a few days around 21 June.

But that's not all...

Because the star of the day also shoots its arrows around the winter solstice The low-angled sun shines down on each of the nave's high capitals with infinite delicacy.

At Easter, it's a different story: spots of light whiten the feet of each column with radical precision, in an obvious symbolic allusion to the ritual of washing the feet.

"The entire design is organised around the reception of this sunlight, which reflects an incredible knowledge of geometry, astronomy and the movement of the seasons, as well as a great mastery of architectural knowledge," analyses Véronique Feugère, another exegete at the Maison du Visitor.