The oldest organ in Christendom plays again after 800 years of silence

 

Archaeologists found 222 bronze pipes, bells, and other objects hidden by Crusaders. Built in 11th-century France for Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, the organ will go to Terra Sancta Museum.  

 

 

On May 20, 2025, the team behind the Resound project achieved a milestone in Jerusalem: several original pipes of a medieval organ emitted sound without restoration. The instrument came back to life in a monastery in Jerusalem’s Old City and was set to be housed at the Terra Sancta Museum, close to the Bethlehem church where it originally sounded. Before unveiling the instrument on Monday, David Catalunya told a news conference that attendees were witnessing a grand development in the history of music. “This organ was buried with the hope that one day it would play again. And the day has arrived, nearly eight centuries later,” said Catalunya, the director of the team of researchers, according to The Independent. 

 

 Inside Saint Saviour’s Monastery, music mingled with church bells as Catalunya played a liturgical chant called “Benedicamus Domino Flos Filius.” During restoration work, it became clear that some of the original pipes still functioned as they did hundreds of years ago, and eight of the organ’s pipes retained sound quality. Catalunya described the sound as “surprising and with a lot of character, very rich and varied throughout the register between bass, mid, and treble pipes”. 

 

 The pipe organ included original pipes from the 11th century. Researchers said it was constructed in France in the 11th century and relocated to the Holy Land in the 12th century to be used in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where it accompanied the Crusader liturgy. After a century of use, the Crusaders buried the organ to protect it from invading Muslim armies, along with other liturgical objects, including bells, following the expulsion of Latin clergy in the 13th century. 

 The importance of the organ went unnoticed for more than a century after workers building a new Franciscan hospice for pilgrims in Bethlehem discovered it in 1906 in an ancient cemetery. Archaeologists uncovered 222 bronze pipes, a set of bells, and other objects hidden by the Crusaders. The possible sonic connection of the buried bells was still under investigation. 

 Starting in 2019, a team of four researchers led by Catalunya set out to create a replica of the organ as part of the Resound project developed by the Complutense Institute of Musical Sciences in Madrid. The project was financed by the European Research Council. The restoration included manufacturing replicas in the Netherlands to reconstruct missing parts, transporting the pieces to Jerusalem, and comparing them with original pipes preserved in the Terra Sancta Museum. A portable organ case was used for acoustic tests during the comparisons. The project remains ongoing, and the researchers warned that the results obtained so far were not definitive. They expect to achieve a first experimental version of the organ within six to eight months, and the final objective was to completely reconstruct the instrument in the coming years. The researchers planned to finish restoring the organ and create copies for churches across Europe and the world so its music would be accessible to all. 

 

 Organ builder Winold van der Putten placed the original pipes alongside replicas he created based on ancient organ-making methods and built a portable wind chest based on a 3D model. Close study of the original pipes illuminated some of the ancient methods. The original pipes, making up about half of the organ, still bore guiding lines made by the original Ottoman craftsmen and engraved scrawls indicating musical notes. “This is an amazing set of information that allows us to reconstruct the manufacturing process so that we can build pipes exactly as they were made about a thousand years ago,” said Catalunya. 

 “It was extremely moving to hear how some of these pipes came to life again after about 700 years under the earth and 800 years of silence,” said Koos van de Linde. “They knew very well what they wanted to hear... The hope of the Crusaders who buried it was not in vain,” added van de Linde. “Finding a living dinosaur, something that we never imagined we could encounter, suddenly made real before our eyes and ears,” said Álvaro Torrente, director of the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales in Madrid. 

 

 Catalunya, who in 2019 was a researcher at the University of Oxford when he located a reference that led him to initiate research on the organ, framed the work and the sound in historical terms. “It’s a way of building pipes, of thinking about music totally differently. In four centuries, music and the construction of organs - organ building - evolved significantly,” said Catalunya. He said the timbre of the organ’s sound was very different from that of a modern or even Renaissance organ. 

 

https://www.jpost.com/archaeology/article-867007  

 

 Dr. David Catalunya with the reconstructed organ