Chapter House
Currently, the community is in the process of reassembling what the monks call their "Sacred Stones," the limestone blocks from the 800-year-old chapter house (meeting room) of the Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria de Ovila that once stood in Trillo, Guadalajara, Spain. William Randolph Hearst purchased and dismantled the chapter house of the old Spanish monastery in 1931 and had the stones shipped to California, intending to include them in Wyntoon, a grand home he was building in remote Northern California. Instead, Hearst gave the stones to the city of San Francisco as part of an arrangement to abate taxes that he owed. The stones sat in San Francisco's Golden Gate park until 1994 when they were given to the abbey. The chapter house is being reconstructed outside the cloister of the Abbey of New Clairvaux. In October, 2008, the ancient chapter house's Gothic portal was completed. In 2009, construction on the interior of the chapter house began with Gothic columns rising to their capitals.
Read more about this topic: Abbey Of New Clairvaux
Famous quotes containing the words chapter and/or house:
“When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)
“Of all the riddles of a married life, said my father ... there is not one that has more intricacies in it than this—that from the very moment the mistress of the house is brought to [child]bed, every female in it ... becomes an inch taller for it....
I think rather, replied my uncle Toby, that ‘tis we who sink an inch lower.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)