I was in yet another cathedral here in Lyon called Cathedrale Saint-Jean Baptiste. Catholic, but not as fancy as others. The architecture is Romanesque. Building started in 1100's and finished in late 1400's.
Romanesque traits are massive stone and brickwork, tall round arches, small windows, usually housing sculpture depicting. Biblical scenes. This has all of those features.
While I was there, they were tuning the organ. It was installed in 1841 and added on to in 1875. It made quite the sound in the massive cathedral.
The cathedral has an interesting feature- the Lyon astronomical clock.. It has an astrolabe in it which is a handheld model of the universe. It was used to identify precise locations of planets and measure latitudes and other stuff I don't understand.
It has several dials. One shows the sun and moon revolving around the earth (like they used to believe) on the horizon of Lyon. Another dial shows minutes numbered one to sixty.
Another part shows a calendar that works for 66 years. So it was set 66 years ago, but stoped in 2017 two years short. There are plans to reset it.
On the top is a automoton that has various figures among them Jesus and Mary that rise according to the day of the week. So Chist rising on Sunday, Death on Monday(because they've known for centuries that Mondays suck), Saint John the Baptist on Tuesday, Saint Stephen on Wednesday, Christ with a chalice on Thursday, a child with a cross on Friday, Mary on Saturday. (per Wikipedia)
This Cathedral is in the Vieux Lyon, the Renaissance area. An interesting thing about the area: in the 1960's the mayor wanted to tear it all down and put in an expressway because the area was unloveable. Protests stopped that and renovations began. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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