The Carved Cedar

French artist Rudy Rahmé's sculpture of Christ carved into a dead cedar trunk.

About a hundred metres along the main path, a fallen cedar trunk has been carved into a sequence of figures depicting the Passion: Christ at the column, the descent from the cross, mourning women. The work, by the Bcharre-born sculptor Rudy Rahmé, dates from the late 1980s and was carried out without removing the tree. The dark, weathered wood and the sheer scale of the trunk — well over a metre in diameter — make it striking even for those uninterested in the religious subject.

Look out also nearby for "Adam and Eve", two living cedars whose trunks have fused at the base, and a small wooden chapel built between two more cedars further up the slope.

things to do sight
A story
When a 2,000-year-old cedar fell in the 1980s, the Lebanese-French sculptor Rudy Rahmé spent three years carving it in situ rather than letting the trunk be removed — turning it into a tableau of Christ's Passion that has become one of the grove's most photographed features.