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THE BELFRY
The heart of the Tower
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The
atmosphere in the belfry changes, from dark to
light, from the profane to the sacred.
The belfry houses the
Requiem, the clock,
and the panels
of coloured glass.
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The Requiem is a
circle of figures carved in lime, representing
various hardships and tragedies that have
afflicted humanity - war, famine, torture,
slavery, persecution, solitude, madness. The
figures stand on a circular platform that rotates
slowly and comes full circle in every hour. There
are twelve figures, one for each month of the
year. The last one, December, represents the
Apocalypse. Seen from below, they are like the
shadows of dead souls. Seen closer, in detail,
they are disturbing, even shocking.
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They
reveal the horror of pain and suffering. The
Requiem is dedicated to all the victims of the
past centuries. Lest we should forget...
They turn up before our
eyes and we remember, they go round the corner
out of our eye sight and we forget.
But they come round
again, and again,
and again...
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"In the summer of
1999 I carved these twelve figures with enormous
speed and with frightening unexpectedness. At
least - it wasn't me who made them. I only led
them into existence. I was helped by the builders
of Chartres, Rheims and Strasbourg as well as by
the Orkney Standing Stones.
To make it took eight weeks and all my previous
life in Russia" (Eduard Bersudsky) |
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The clock face. It is
an eye. It is a sun. It is a moon with its cycles.
It is the cycle of day and night, light and dark.
It is also the cycle of life, with its black
moments, grey moments,
and a ray of sunshine. |
THE GLASS
| Sweet light pours out
of the coloured glass panels. The glass is the
most contemporary element in the tower. Windows
are destroyed easily, by fire, by earthquakes, by
bombs, by vandals. And they get replaced, by new
masters, with new imagery. It is a rebirth of
figures which once inhabited glass bowls and
vases, and which have come alive again and are
trying to reconnect and make sense-at the top of
the tower. When we, believers
and non-believers, visit a cathedral, we get our
most powerful impressions from the light flooding
through the stained glass windows. The creation
of pictures and images and stories with the help
of coloured glass has its roots in antiquity. For
the people in the Middle Ages, light was on of
God’s manifestations, so much so that they
saw in the translucent stained glass windows
representations of the Lord’s word.
Theologians attributed to them the virtue of
enlightening humanity, and keeping them away from
evil.
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The imagery in
the glass panels of the clock tower, although more
secular than those seen on mediaeval and gothic
cathedrals, tells the story of people: their activities,
their relationships. But in this case, you will not be
granted a metaphysical experience as you can only see the
windows from the outside,
and are left to imagine what it would be like to be inside
the tower with the light flooding in through the
colourful glass.
The technique used to create
the glass panels is called OVERFANG technique. It is a
lengthy process: the glass is cased in several layers of
colours, sandblasted and blown into the form of a
cylinder. It is cut, slumped in the kiln, cut again,
fused in the kiln.
THE
CLOCK
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The
belfry also houses the clock. After the chaos of
the other parts of the tower, here is a haven of
order and precision. The clock, symbol of man's
intellectual curiosity that led to the foundation
of the first universities, of man's technological
resourcefulness that encouraged the introduction
of the windmill, the development of new
industrial techniques, the invention of the
mechanical clock, gunpowder, navigation
instruments, large-scale printing.
The word clock comes
from the German word Glocke, which means bell,
which was the first device used to signal hours
of the day. Monks used bells to signal the
canonical hour and later to summon people to mass.
The clock is also the most common type of
functional automata.
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For most people
in the last millennium, time has not been very important.
They rose at first light and stopped working when the
light faded. Time keeping has evolved slowly and is now
internationally standardized. It is based on Greenwich
Mean Time - because Britain was an international naval
force and it was essential for survival to know how long
ago the ship had left port to know where they were.
| For space ships to
meet we need greater precision than the pendulum
clock -we have the atomic cesium clock. Clocks
measure time. And like all measurements they
divide the world into smaller and smaller parts
as we become more precise and more focused on
detail. For most of us, being five minutes late
is not a problem. But in space, that could be
missing the appointment by a thousand miles... |
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The clock has a
dead beat escapement. It has an hourly strike controlled
by a count wheel. - pendulum length 2,20m - pendulum
weight 26kg. The pendulum swings 1,5 seconds from side to
side. The electric winding operates every hour.
The pendulum clock for the
Millennium Clock Tower was built in the 1880's. It was
found in a farmer's shed in the St Boswells area (Scottish
Borders). It was restored by Jürgen Tübbecke and an
electric winding system was added.
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