Nha Trang Stone Church

A cross stands 38 meters above the street, on top of a hill in the middle of a seaside city. How a whole church came to stand up there, under that cross, is a puzzle with several parts.

The official name of the building is Nhà thờ Chánh tòa Kitô Vua, the Cathedral of Christ the King. People here prefer friendlier names: Nhà thờ Núi, the Mountain Church, and Nhà thờ Đá, the Stone Church. Yet its walls are not built of mountain stone. That is one more small puzzle. The church stands on Bông Hill, about 12 meters above the homes around it. It looks down on the busy Ngã Sáu roundabout, where six roads meet in the center of Nha Trang. The answer to the big puzzle does not arrive all at once. It comes in stages, like the steps that lead up the hill.

The first stage begins with a man. Father Louis Vallet was a Frenchman, born in 1869. In his day, the Catholics of Nha Trang had no church of their own. They prayed in a small temporary chapel on the seashore, where the bishop's residence stands today. Father Vallet wanted Nha Trang to have a parish of its own. The first task he took on was to build a church.

The second stage is the mountain itself. To set a church up high, you first need a place to set it. So the hill was split in two. Its western half was leveled with 500 explosive charges. The blasts opened up 4,500 square meters of ground. That is 500 charges, just to give one church a place to stand. Work began on September 3, 1928, with the architect Nesty as technical adviser.

The third stage brings back the puzzle of the name. The walls of the church were built of cement blocks. And those blocks were cast by hand, by Father Louis Vallet himself and the people working with him. Split stone was used, but mostly for paving the paths and the courtyard. Still, people standing at the foot of the hill and looking up often compare the church to an old castle on a mountaintop. And the name Stone Church simply stayed, as lasting as the walls themselves.

The fourth stage is even more surprising. The roofs over the aisles on either side were poured in reinforced concrete. But the vaulted ceiling inside has a frame of split bamboo, woven together with wire mesh. Bamboo, the familiar plant of the Vietnamese countryside, lies quietly inside the vaults of a Gothic church.

Gothic is a style of old European architecture that loves to reach upward. Here, the arches are wide, shaped in curving segments, and point up toward the sky. The front of the church is clearly divided into three levels. At the bottom are the doors. In the middle is a large round window shaped like a rose. At the very top are a gallery and two bell towers.

The fifth stage is light. The designers wanted to welcome sunshine from both sides, the east and the west. So the arched windows and the rose window were fitted with many kinds of colored glass, in blue and in red. In the morning, the eastern sun shines in. In the afternoon, the western sun drops by. Inside, paintings on the walls show the 14 Stations of the Cross, which tell the suffering and death of Jesus.

The sixth stage is the sound of the bells, and this stage moved very slowly. The bronze bells were made by a French company, cast in France and shipped all the way to Nha Trang. In 1933, they still had to hang for a while on a wooden tower. The first bell, tuned to E flat, was blessed on July 29, 1934. The other two, tuned to C and to A, had to wait until 1939. Beside them is a large clock with four faces, turned toward the four directions of the city.

Then there is the matter of time. In 1933, the church was consecrated, and that same year the parish of Nha Trang was officially born. But the work did not stop there. Only in December 1941 was the building fully finished. From the first day of work to the last, more than 13 years had passed. On November 24, 1960, Nha Trang was raised to the rank of a full diocese. And the church on Bông Hill officially became its cathedral.

The way up starts on Thái Nguyên Street, with 53 steps. Each step takes a person a little farther from the traffic below. At the top of the steps is the gate to the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. On the left of the path up stand statues. There are the 14 Stations of the Cross and the 12 apostles. There are 24 saints, a statue of Christ the King and a statue of the Risen Christ. On the right is a wall of small niches, where the remains of the dead are laid to rest.

At the top, the church covers about 720 square meters. Down at the foot of the hill, toward the roundabout, lies Ave Maria Square. Every Christmas Eve, the faithful gather there for the vigil Mass.

Father Louis Vallet died on October 24, 1945. He was buried at the foot of the hill, on the right of the path that leads up to the church. The man who once cast those cement blocks by hand now rests right in the shadow of the church he began.

So the secret of the castle on the hill is a mountain split in two and cement blocks cast by hand. It is vaults that hide a frame of bamboo, and bells that came a very long way from France. Then the bells ring out from the high tower. The sound rolls down the 53 steps, down to the square, and down to the traffic that keeps flowing around the Ngã Sáu roundabout.