Maintenance today costs around $1.5m annually, paid for by the foundation set up by the former president. The cost of the church’s construction had doubled the country’s debt.
By the time the basilica was finished, the Ivorian economy was reeling from a crash in world commodity prices, and so its estimated US $300 million tag raised eyebrows. To date, that hospital remains unfinished.Ĭontroversy also surrounded the financing of Notre-Dame de la Paix. In light of the basilica’s brash imitation of the Vatican’s holy shrine, a reluctant John Paul II consecrated the building in 1990 only on the condition that a hospital be constructed near the church. But we surpassed it because evolutions in architecture … allowed us to go much further than previously possible.” “The intention was never to surpass Rome. He had a deal with Ivory Coast, but most of all he had a deal with God,” Fakhoury said in an interview on the basilica’s 20th anniversary.
“This project from Houphouët was fundamentally driven by his faith. Pierre Fakhoury, the celebrated Lebanese–Ivorian architect behind the monument, frequently batted away claims that the basilica was intended to be the world’s largest. Houphouët-Boigny complied, but instead topped it with a giant golden cross, making this the world’s tallest church. Loosely modelled after St Peter’s basilica in the Vatican, Pope John Paul II requested the cupola be slightly lower so as not to surpass the papal one. The history behind Notre-Dame de la Paix’s construction is no less dramatic negotiations with Rome were apparently fraught. Inside there is standing room for 11,000 people, yet attendances usually only number in the few hundredsĮach of the 7,000 seats in the basilica’s nave has its own personal air-conditioning system. Five-thousand shades of stained glass make up the windows, including one depicting Houphouët-Boigny kneeling in front of Jesus. Inside there is standing room for 11,000, while each of the 7,000 seats in the nave has its own personal (Italian-built) air-conditioning system.
Notre dame basilica and then there was light windows#
A sudden mirage rises on a stretch of lonely scrubland kaleidoscopic stained-glass windows and ivory-white columns are topped with a giant pearl dome that rises 158 metres above the bush. The resulting building was – and still is – staggering, nonetheless. But neither embassies nor ministries ever relocated from Abidjan, so Notre-Dame de la Paix’s chosen location was a near-deserted, forest-surrounded town of empty six-lane highways that led nowhere.
Another crop of grand monuments followed, including the five-star Hôtel Président and a marble-floored, rarely-used convention centre. In 1983, Houphouët-Boigny rechristened Yamoussoukro as his country’s new capital. Ivory Coast’s 3,000-metre airport runway was one of only two on the whole continent that was long enough to land a Concorde the other was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire), where President Mobutu Sese Seko built the “Versailles in the Jungle” in his birthplace of Gbadolite. His birthplace, Yamoussoukro – formerly a small agricultural village – became home to a palace surrounded by a crocodile-filled lake a visit there inspired VS Naipaul’s celebrated essay “The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro”, in which the writer suggested the reptiles symbolised Houphouët-Boigny’s mystique over his people.Įlsewhere in Africa, other strongmen whose coffers were swelling on the commodity boom were doing similar things. In the economic capital, Abidjan, he built the towering Hôtel Ivoire, a favourite for French expatriates which for a time possessed the only ice-skating rink in west Africa. Notre-Dame de la Paix is topped by a giant pearl dome that rises to 158 metres.
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