Chartres is the most completely preserved of the great French Gothic cathedrals, and a Marian shrine that has drawn pilgrims for well over a thousand years.
Built fast, and kept
Most great cathedrals were built over centuries and repeatedly altered; Chartres was largely rebuilt in a single sustained campaign after a fire in 1194 destroyed the earlier church, and it was substantially complete within about a quarter of a century. That speed gave it an unusual unity, and later centuries left it comparatively untouched, so that its stained glass, its sculpture and its floor labyrinth survive as originals rather than replacements to a degree true almost nowhere else. The deep blue of its windows became proverbial. The two contrasting spires, one plain Romanesque survivor of the fire and one late-Gothic, record the building's history at a glance.
The relic and the pilgrimage
Chartres has been a centre of devotion to the Virgin Mary since the early Middle Ages, focused on a relic, the Sancta Camisa, held to be the tunic or veil Mary wore, given to the cathedral in the ninth century. The town's fairs and its pilgrimage grew up around it. The great sculptural programmes of the portals and the windows form one of the most complete surviving statements of medieval Christian teaching in visual form, a "Bible in stone and glass".
The labyrinth, and today
Set into the nave floor around 1200 is a labyrinth about thirteen metres across, a single unbranching path that pilgrims walk as a form of prayer, sometimes read as a symbolic journey to Jerusalem; it is cleared of chairs on certain days for that purpose. Chartres remains the working cathedral of its diocese and an active parish, and the annual student pilgrimage from Paris still arrives on foot. It is a World Heritage site.