This is a picture of the interior of medieval Christ Church, Dublin, Ireland. A very rare sight to see an empty Christ Church, considering it is one of Dublin`s most visited tourist sites.
The cathedral was founded probably sometime after 1028 when King Sitric Silkenbeard, the Hiberno-Norse king of Dublin made a pilgrimage to Rome. The first bishop of this new Dublin diocese was Dúnán or Donat, and the diocese was at that time a small island of land surrounded by the much larger Diocese of Glendalough, and was for a time answerable to Canterbury rather than to the Irish Church hierarchy. The church was built on the high ground overlooking the Viking settlement at Wood Quay and Sitric gave the `lands of Baldoyle, Raheny and Portrane for its maintenance.`[2] Of the four old Celtic Christian churches reputed to have existed around Dublin, only one, dedicated to St. Martin of Tours, lay within the walls of the Viking city, and so Christ Church was one of just two churches for the whole city.[2]
The cathedral was originally staffed by secular clergy. The second Bishop of Dublin introduced the Benedictines. In 1163, Christ Church was converted to a priory of the Regular Order of Arrosian Canons Reformed Augustinian Rule by the second Archbishop of Dublin, later saint, Laurence O`Toole, who adhered to the rule himself; it was subsequently headed by an Augustinian prior, who ranked as the second ecclesiastical figure of the diocese, and not a dean, until re-establishment in 1541.
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