Architect Tombazis also designed the new prayer room, a work carried out to mark the centenary of the apparitions in 2017.
Greek architect Alexandros Tombazis, author of the projects for the Holy Trinity Church in Fatima, which was inaugurated in 2007, on the 90th anniversary of the apparitions, died on Monday at the age of 85, the Fatima Shrine reported on Tuesday.
In a message of condolence to the Greek architect’s family and collaborators, Father Carlos Kapsinhas, dean of the Fatima shrine, stressed that Tombazis “will always remain connected to the sanctuary.”
Alexandros Tombazis won the competition that began in 1997 to build a large covered meeting space, since the capacity of Our Lady of the Rosary Cathedral was not sufficient to accommodate all the pilgrims.
According to the Fatima Shrine, since the 1970s, its administrators have wanted “to provide their pilgrims with a ceremonial space that could bring together the faithful in a comfortable way from an aesthetic, theological, anthropological, physical and psychological point of view.” .
With the Church of the Holy Trinity, the architect inaugurated, in the Cova da Iria, “an architectural landscape that respects the canons advocated by the so-called minimalist architecture and which can be described as the architecture of silence”, which today is considered by Marco Daniel Duarte, director of the Museum of the Sanctuary of Fatima.
Architect Tombazis also designed the new prayer room, a work carried out to mark the centenary of the apparitions in 2017.