ZURICH, SWITZERLAND — Artist Marc Chagall was already a tired old man in 1967 when he was invited to sit facing the blank windows of this town’s most famous church.

Since 1960, the search had been on for an artist worthy of creating stained-glass windows for the Fraumunster.

The church has for over a millennia been the spiritual home for the city’s residents. First for the Catholics, then Protestants after the Reformation and even those of the Russian Orthodox faith during a period of occupation in 1799.

Despite an extensive international search by city officials, no artist had been found suitable. But in 1967, a major retrospective of Chagall’s work in Zurich brought the world’s most famous Jewish artist to one of Europe’s oldest churches.

Chagall sat in one of the aisles under the 18-metre-high section of the church that had over the years been renovated into Romanesque and then Gothic styles. At 80 years old, at the height of his fame, Chagall was inspired enough sitting in the church that he decided to take on the massive project of creating five stained-glass windows for the Fraumunster.

“Stained glass has to be serious and passionate,” Chagall had said. “It has to live through the perception of light.”

The Russian-born Chagall discovered the art of stained glass in the 1950s and had already created memorial pieces for the United Nations building when he undertook the Fraumunster designs.

The final creation, which took him one year to sketch and another three to complete and install inside the Fraumunster, has made the Protestant church one of the most popular tourist destinations in Switzerland’s largest city.

Despite its popularity as an attraction for visitors, the church remains part of the community for hundreds of Protestants who regularly attend weekly service. When the church temporarily shut down in 2006 and 2007 for renovations, the churchgoers had to find other places to worship.

“During that time, the people of this community badly missed coming to their church,” says Jerome Stern, one of the volunteers at the Fraumunster. “This church is part of their identity.”

Of the many church spires that spike Zurich’s skyline creating visual navigational point for residents and visitors, none is more recognizable than the Fraumunster’s slim green peak.

As a sign of how ancient this city is, the Fraumunster, which means Church of Our Lady, isn’t even Zurich’s oldest cathedral. That distinction lies with St. Peter’s, built a few decades before the 874 construction of the Fraumunster.

Compared to other churches, the Fraumunster is relatively small despite its visibility from nearly anywhere in the Old Town of Zurich and easily walked to within the city’s compact city centre. The church is located on the banks of the River Limmat on Munsterhof Square, the site of the city’s former pigs’ market.

The Chagall stained glass isn’t the first artwork to greet visitors upon entrance inside the church. Before Chagall’s work overshadowed everything else, Augusto Giacometti, cousin of Alberto, created over a 15-year-period a 9-metre tall stained glass on the theme of paradise. It was completed shortly before the end of the World War II after numerous financing delays and is today called the peace window.

In any other church, the peace window with its depiction of eight figures of the prophets and four evangelists flanked by kneeling angels would be the spotlight. But when Chagall’s five stained-glass windows were installed 25 years afterwards in 1970, the artist’s renderings of the story of the Bible using green and blue to represent earth and red and yellow to depict the heavens became an instant attraction bringing in art lovers and visitors to the Fraumünster.

The colour of Chagall’s windows are the first thing visitors notice when they enter the section of the church known as the choir with its star-speckled ceilings. On the north wall is the Prophets window in red and orange depicting Elijah’s ascent into heaven on a chariot and a pitiable Jeremiah, the bearer of news. The south wall, in Chagall’s famous blue tones, show a window of Moses holding the Ten Commandments. Three stained-glass windows dominate the east wall of the church with Jacob on his ladder wrestling with an Angel in blue and, on the right, the End of Days depicted with an angel blowing a trumpet. The main showcase of the room is the green “Christ” window, the largest of the five stained glass in the room, showing the family tree of Jesus and Christ flowing upwards, arm outstretched.

Chagall, who had admired then grown disenchanted with the Russian Revolution after 1917 and narrowly escaped the clutches of the Gestapo in occupied France during World War II, was hugely influenced by the story of the Bible after visiting Palestine in the 1930s.

Best seen in bright morning light, the five stained-glass windows created for the Fraumunster lightens the entire church, the colours instantly recognizable as Chagall’s. Stand beneath these works of art inside a darkening church built upon relics in a crypt below and Chagall’s words take on a renewed meaning.

“For me a stained-glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world,” Chagall said. “It is something elevating and exhilarating.”

Just the Facts

The Fraumünster is open daily, year-round. Admission is free.