The Western Portal
The round-arched western portal is of Romanesque style. The portal has been badly damaged, (probably in the St. George's Night Uprising), and of its original design only the archivolt remains. The splayed jambs, the gable and the flat frieze lining the archivolt date from later medieval reconstruction.
Read more about this topic: Valjala Church
Famous quotes containing the words western and/or portal:
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)
“Some sepulcher, remote, alone,
Against whose portal she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone—
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne’er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)