Not far from the Hôtel de Ville , where the Place de la Chatelet meets the Avenue de Sébastopol and the Rue de Rivoli, stands proudly one of the ancient monuments that survived the decisive operation carried out by Baron Haussmann in old Paris, on the orders of Napoleon III. The Saint-Jacques Tower, built in the ostentatious Gothic style, remains the only remnant of that church with the strange name “Saint-Jacques des Butchers”.
The 16th-century church was probably named for its patronage, the butchers who lived in the original markets of Paris had not yet made way for the current Le Halle district . The church itself was destroyed shortly after the French Revolution, but the tower that served as a lead workshop survived. Haussmann restored the tower, and at the same time that he paved the Rue de Rivoli, he created the small park around the building. The tower, declared a historical monument in 1862, has been one of the starting points for pilgrims walking the pilgrim route, leading from France to the pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostela in Spain (the third most important site for Catholic Christianity after Jerusalem and the Vatican in Rome).
Saint Jacques the French (in Spanish Santiago and in English Saint James) is none other than James the son of Zebedee, the fisherman from Tiberias and one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, who set out to spread the gospel of Jesus in Spain and after failing to return to Jerusalem, was accused of spreading Christianity and beheaded by Herod Agrippa. The head of the first Christian martyr was separated from his body and buried in the Cathedral of Saint James in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem. However, his bones mysteriously wandered on a clam, and according to another belief on a ship covered in shells to protect them until they reached the shores of the Iberian Peninsula. And there, according to legend, they were buried and forgotten. About 750 years after the burial of Saint James, a constellation miraculously illuminates the burial place for several nights, guiding an innocent shepherd to that field of stars (field = campus stella = stars), and thus the Holy Sepulcher was rediscovered.
The chapel of Santiago de Compostela (Saint James of the Field of Stars) was built on the site by King Alfonso II. Since then, to this day, near the Saint Jacques Tower in Paris, many pilgrims meet, armed with the symbol of the oyster around their necks, and they make their way (hundreds and thousands of kilometers), towards the basilica where they believe, their stay in purgatory will be shortened on their way to redemption in heaven. Saint Jacques is credited with miracles, including the virtue of fertility, barren and childless people usually go to his tomb, and stand in a long line to kiss the symbol of James the Fisherman fixed in front, the symbol of the golden shell. Some claim that the attribute of fertility, including the oyster, was actually borrowed from the pagan world of Venus, the goddess of fertility floating on the back of a shell. (As can be seen in Botticelli's famous painting).
Saint-Jacques and the oyster have an equally interesting culinary connection, and not far from the tower, in seafood restaurants in the Marais area, the fresh and exquisite Saint-Jacques oysters are served - with their soft texture, whose story is the story of that oyster, the oyster of Jacob ben Zebedee.
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