Quirinus Chapel

Down here under the Passerelle, the rock has a door in it. The Quirinus Chapel is half building and half cave: a small Gothic front of pale stone, and behind it two chambers cut straight into the cliff of the Pétrusse valley. It is thought to be the oldest place of worship in the city, and the reason is not the chapel but the spring beside it.

People almost certainly came to this water long before anyone built anything here; the site is believed to have been a shrine before it was Christian. By the eleventh century it was dedicated to Quirinus, a Roman officer martyred for his faith, and the water was credited with curing eye trouble, skin disease and wounds that would not heal. For centuries the sick walked down into the valley to wash in it. In 1900 chemists finally analysed the spring and found nothing in it that could explain any of that.

The stone front you are looking at was built around 1355 by the Teutonic Knights, the crusading order that ran a hospital in the town. Their cross is carved above the door. To the right of it, jutting out of the wall, is a small open-air pulpit, so that a priest could preach to pilgrims standing outside in the valley. Inside there is a stone altar and a row of painted wooden saints on a ledge in the rock. The slate roof and the little bell tower came much later, in the 1880s.

Quirinus mattered here more than you would guess. He was the patron saint of the fortress and, from 1455, of the whole city, until the Jesuits replaced him in 1666 with Our Lady, Consoler of the Afflicted, whose procession still fills the streets every spring. The chapel is usually locked, but the door is an iron grille, so you can look straight through into the rock.