Move FM Global News

JERUSALEM, Israel: After lying silent for nearly eight centuries, what experts believe to be the oldest surviving pipe organ in the Christian world was heard again on September 9, its resonant tones filling a Jerusalem monastery with music once thought lost to history.

The instrument, built with pipes dating back to the 11th century, produced a bold, sonorous sound as musician and researcher David Catalunya performed the liturgical chant Benedicamus Domino Flos Filius inside Saint Saviour’s Monastery in Jerusalem’s Old City. The music, swelling through the vaulted halls, mingled with the distant toll of church bells, creating a scene that bridged the medieval past with the present.

“For centuries this organ lay buried with the hope that one day it would play again,” Catalunya told reporters ahead of the unveiling. “And that day has finally come, almost 800 years later.”

The organ will now be housed at the nearby Terra Sancta Museum, only a short distance from Bethlehem, where it is thought to have originally been used.

Historians believe Crusaders brought the instrument to Bethlehem in the 11th century, during their occupation of Jerusalem. After about a hundred years of use, it was carefully hidden away—buried to protect it from invading Muslim armies. The organ remained entombed until 1906, when workers digging the foundations for a Franciscan hospice in Bethlehem stumbled across an ancient cemetery and uncovered a remarkable cache: 222 bronze pipes, bells, and other fittings deliberately concealed by the Crusaders.

“It was extremely moving to hear these pipes speak again after 700 years underground and 800 years of silence,” said organ expert Koos van de Linde, who worked on the restoration. “The hope of those who buried them—that one day they would sound again—was not in vain.”

In 2019, a team of four researchers led by Catalunya began reconstructing the organ, initially planning to make a replica. But to their astonishment, they found that a significant number of the original pipes still functioned.

Organ builder Winold van der Putten incorporated those surviving pieces, alongside replicas crafted using medieval techniques guided by markings and engravings found on the originals. Roughly half the instrument now consists of 11th-century pipes bearing scrawled musical notes and guidelines left by long-ago craftsmen.

Alvaro Torrente, director of the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales in Madrid, where the project was based, described the revival as “the musical equivalent of discovering a living dinosaur.”

The researchers aim to complete the restoration of the entire instrument and eventually create replicas for churches across Europe and beyond.

“This extraordinary find gives us a window into the precise methods of organ making a thousand years ago,” Catalunya said. “It allows us not only to hear the past but to make it live again.”