00:00This is the sound of an original pipe.
00:20This is the oldest organ in Christendom.
00:23It was an instrument which was built in the 11th century in France.
00:27It was used for one century in France in some Romanesque church
00:31until it was transported to the Holy Land by the Crusaders in the 12th century.
00:36During the 12th century it was used in the Nativity Church in Bethlehem
00:41and in the 13th century it was dismantled in order to protect it from an invasion.
00:48So it remained buried for eight centuries.
00:52In the 20th century the pipes were recovered
00:55and now we are performing a very detailed study
00:58in order to reconstruct the original shape of the organ
01:01and also to recover its sound.
01:03This is a window into the past unique in the world.
01:06So here we have the opportunity for the first time in modern history
01:10of listening a medieval sound which is thousand years old.
01:15And it's not through a recreation or through a hypothetical reconstruction,
01:20but it's really the original sound.
01:23The same vibration that the Crusaders heard at the Nativity Church.
01:26Complex there are 222 pipes that survive,
01:30so the process is extremely complex.
01:32We had to document pipe by pipe to measure,
01:35in order to have all the information we needed,
01:39to understand how the pipes are made,
01:41in order to be able to reproduce the manufacturing process
01:46so that we can replicate the pipes and bring them to life again.
01:50It's like finding a living dinosaur,
01:53because it's something that we know that existed,
01:56but we only know from very, from fossils,
02:00so from very limited evidence.
02:02And this is not a fossil, this is the real object,
02:05and the real sound, which means it's a living organ.
02:35We have
02:50our stories.
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