See 1st photos of Notre Dame Cathedral's restoration, 5 years after ...

Half a decade after a fire ripped through Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, damaging large portions of the 860-year-old Gothic-style building, the world is getting a look at the painstaking restoration efforts to bring the church back to life.

French President Emmanuel Macron toured the UNESCO World Heritage Site Friday, trailed by a pool of photographers and journalists, taking in the meticulous, €700 million (more than C$1 billion) restoration.

And what a difference – “This is overwhelming,” he said as he viewed the glistening, cleaned white stones, Reuters reported.

Macron thanked the nearly 400 firefighters who “saved this cathedral” on April 15, 2019 – the day the world watched in horror as a fire that started in the roof spread rapidly, sending flames and smoke high into the sky.

“The blaze at Notre Dame was a national wound and you were the remedy, through your determination, hard work and commitment,” he said, speaking to the approximately 1,300 workers who gathered to welcome Macron and celebrate their achievements.

The fire destroyed the church’s spire and roof and left heavy smoke and water damage to the main cathedral area of the building.

After the fire was extinguished that day, Macron pledged to the public that “we will rebuild the cathedral to be even more beautiful, and I want it to be completed within five years.”

On Friday, Marcon gazed up at rebuilt soaring ceilings and creamy good-as-new stonework.

Gone are the gaping holes that the blaze scorched into the vaulted ceilings, leaving charred piles of debris. New stonework has been carefully pieced together to repair and fill the wounds that had left the cathedral’s insides exposed to the elements. Delicate golden angels look on from the centrepiece of one of the rebuilt ceilings, seeming to fly again above the transept.

The cathedral’s bright, cream-coloured limestone walls look brand new, cleaned not only of dust and harmful chemicals from the fire but also of grime that had accumulated for centuries.

Before the restoration work could get underway, clean-up crews needed to get rid of dangerous toxins and make sure the building was safe enough for tradespeople to begin their work.

Powerful vacuum cleaners were used to first remove toxic dust released when the fire melted the cathedral’s lead roofs.

Fine layers of latex were then sprayed onto the surfaces and removed a few days later, taking dirt away with them from the stones’ pores, nooks and crevices. In all, 42,000 square metres of stonework were cleaned and decontaminated — an area equivalent to roughly six soccer fields.

“It feels like it was built yesterday, like it’s just been born, even though Notre Dame is very old,” stonemason Adrien Willeme, who worked on the reconstruction, told The Associated Press.

“Because it’s been so carefully restored and cleaned, it looks really extraordinary.”

Craftspeople from all corners of the globe, masters in their respective trades, re-created tools used by the original builders of the nearly 900-year-old cathedral to ensure the rebuild matched exactly what was originally unveiled at its 1345 opening.

Drag the button to see before and after photos of the altar in the Notre Dame Cathedral.

“We’re using a mix of 13th-century tools such as the broad axes or dog walk — to finish all the surfaces, we’re using chisels and saws, mallets,” American carpenter Hank Silver told NBC News in April.

“Everything is finished by hand so that the result is an almost identical replica of the Gothic frame that was there.”

Carpenters worked like their medieval counterparts as they hewed giant oak beams to rebuild the roof and spire that collapsed like a flaming spear into the inferno. The beams show the marks of the carpenters’ handiwork, with dents made on the woodwork by their hand axes.

Some 2,000 oak trees were felled to rebuild roof frameworks so dense and intricate that they are nicknamed “the forest.”

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Scaffolding still clings to large areas of Notre Dame’s exterior, and cranes clutter the skyline around the cathedral.

Philippe Jost, who is masterminding the reconstruction, told The Associated Press that scaffolding at the base of the newly-restored spire will remain into 2025 and for another three years on the monument’s east side.

And while some Parisians have expressed disappointment that the cathedral’s exterior doesn’t yet match the fresh interior, Notre Dame has been a construction site for many years — even before the blaze. Scaffolding was already in place in 2019 for a previous restoration effort that wasn’t completed because of the April 15 fire.

An opening ceremony — to which celebrities and heads of state have been invited — is planned for the evening of Dec. 7, followed by days of special Masses to celebrate the reopening and to thank those who helped save and rebuild the cathedral.

The public will be welcomed to come see the restoration in the following week, with free, ticketed entry, before the cathedral returns to a regular liturgical program on Dec.16.

“We are very eager to welcome the whole world under the roof of our cathedral,” Paris’ Archbishop Laurent Ulrich said in a message on the cathedral website, expressing the Church’s gratitude to all those who helped save it.

“On the night of April 15, hundreds of thousands of people committed themselves to what then seemed an impossible bet: to restore the cathedral and give it back its splendor within the unprecedented deadline of five years.”

Ulrich expects Notre Dame will quickly surpass its pre-blaze visitor numbers. He is bracing for 15 million visitors annually.

–with files from The Associated Press and Reuters

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