Five Things to Know about Notre Dame Cathedral

01Notre Dame Cathedral in the French capital of Paris is set to reopen to the public Sunday, after a five-year-long rebuilding project.

02The cathedral had been badly damaged in a fire in 2019.

03The Roman Catholic Religious Center is considered a jewel of Gothic building design, a symbol of Paris, and is a popular site to visit.

04The cathedral took 182 years to build, between the 12th and 14th centuries.

05It holds some surprising stories.

06Here are five special things to know about this famous Parisian site.

07In front of the cathedral, a metal and stone marker in the road describes the place as the starting point of the roads of France.

08This sign marks the starting point for measuring distances between Paris and other cities across the country.

09The marker was placed in 1924, but the idea of the cathedral as the center of the nation dates to 1769.

10King Louis XV thought there should be a central site for France's growing system of roads.

11That idea tied the nation's geography to its heart in Paris.

12Those frightening stone statues on Notre Dame might seem ancient, but not all of them are what they appear.

13The gargoyles are monster-shaped elements used to direct rainwater away from the building.

14They have been around since the time of the cathedral's construction.

15But the monster-like creatures often seen in photos and movies are Camara, and they are much newer.

16In 1841, the French government asked the architects Eugène Violet Le Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassoe to repair the then-collapsing building.

17Violet Le Duc added these frightening-looking statues to make the cathedral seem more mysterious.

18He drew ideas for the Camara from Victor Hugo's famous book, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

19How to tell them apart?

20Gargoyles resemble horizontal spikes coming out of the facade and have spouts to permit rainwater to flow out.

21During the French Revolution, there were protests of religious centers.

22In 1793, revolutionaries took away the cathedral's religious symbols and renamed it Notre Dame de la Raison, or, in English, Our Lady of Reason.

23During that time, the cathedral held events celebrating science and new ideas.

24And for a short time, it was even used to store the alcoholic drink called wine.

25Religious services started again in 1795, under the rule of Napoleon I.

26In 1792, revolutionaries also cut the heads off 28 statues from the front of Notre Dame, thinking the statues were of French royalty.

27They were really representations of ancient kings of Judah, from stories in the Bible, the Christian holy book.

28The heads were thought lost forever.

29But in 1977, workers working in a courtyard in Paris uncovered hundreds of pieces of stone sculptures.

30Experts confirmed they were the missing heads of Notre Dame's Kings of Judah statues.

31Today, 22 of the heads have been repaired and are shown at the Cluny Museum in Paris.

32The 2019 fire that almost destroyed Notre Dame caused a serious health risk.

33When the flames melted the top of the building, large amounts of harmful lead dust were released into the air and came down across Paris.

34Officials found there were no rules to measure the danger of outdoor lead dust.

35This was not just a Paris issue.

36Major cities like London and Rome, and even the World Health Organization, do not have guidelines for outdoor lead pollution.

37The Notre Dame fire forced officials to take a closer look at their safety standards.

38It took four months for the city to complete an extensive cleaning of the city's streets, even as visitors and the citizens of Paris walked around the cathedral every day.

39Now that you know these five things, you can enjoy seeing the photos of the new Notre Dame when it opens to the public.

40I'm Katie Weaver.