French Baron Amadeus Marie Paul de Piellat was born in 1852.
He entered into the religious life in 1874 and made a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land.
He decided to open a new Catholic hospital in Jerusalem and
bought the land on the spot where a Lazarist leper’s hospital had operated in
the 12th century.
The Hospital of Saint Louis was designed in Baroque
Renaissance style, and named for King Louis IX of France. A very nice detail of
the hospital was the decoration of the interior walls, all covered with the
brightly colored coats of arms belonging to the Nobility of the Holy Land.
Unfortunately, the Turks got control of the city before World War I and covered
the heraldic designs with black paint.
The hospital continues more than a century of medical care
to patients of all faiths as a hospice for the terminally ill. It is currently
entrusted to the sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition (a Catholic Order
founded in France in 1832).
In 2014 a water pipe burst in the hospital storeroom, and
during the clean-up, the nuns discovered some hitherto unknown heraldic
paintings.
After more than 100 years, the paintings were in bad condition and
were restored in 2018, getting them back to their original beauty.
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