Sacred Heart Basilica - Timaru, New Zealand

🌹 Wonders and anecdotes

• The parish was founded on 25 October 1874 by Father John Tubman SM with a simple wooden chapel; when in 1907 Tubman returned to Timaru after a trip to Reno (Nevada), he brought plans of a church that had impressed him and ordered the architect Francis Petre to adapt them to the side of Craigie Avenue.
• Francis William Petre (1847- 1918), born in Petone and formed in England and France, is considered the great master of the classical style in New Zealand ecclesiastical architecture; the Basilica of Timaru was his last great work before he died and the natural cast of a sequence of cathedrals that included St. Joseph of Dunedin (1878) and that of the Holy Eucharist of Christchurch.
• The first stone was placed on 6 February 1910 by Bishop Grimes and Bishop Verdon of Dunedin; to contain costs, the parish priest Tubman personally directed the works with daily paid day workers and a massive voluntary collaboration: farmers of Levels cut blue eucalyptus for the scaffolding and the locals of St Andrews carried sand in bulllock teams to the train road.
• The building, of reinforced concrete, Oamaru stone and local brick, combines the Ionian order with elements of the Roman renaissance and art nouveau details; its ship culminates in an inner dome of 21.33 meters in height supported by Ionian columns, on which an external copper dome is raised to 35 meters from the ground, visible from any point of the city.
• In 2015 the basilica was subjected to a two-year seismic reinforcement campaign that used three-dimensional scanning and modeling and non-linear temporal history analysis; reopened on 8 November 2020, it retains its category I of New Zealand historical heritage, granted on 2 April 1982, and remains the architectural reference point of the Southern Canterbury.