A passage that can take you from East Belfast directly to Narnia? It could be there, you just only have to try entering the magic wardrobe!
I’m not mad, I swear, just I’m talking about the statue “The Searcher” dedicated to Charles Staples Lewis, the well-known author of “The Chronicles of Narnia“.
C.S.Lewis is surely one of the most famous personalieties coming from Belfast, and for the first part of his life he lived in this zone, in the East part of the city. “The Searcher” sculpture has been commissioned to the northern-irish artist Ross Wilson for the centenary of the writer’s birth, celebrated in 1998.
The monument is inspired to the famous Chronicles of Narnia, saga made of seven books in which the main characters can reach other worlds thorugh a magic wardrobe; this explains the unusual subject of the sculpture: a man entering a wardrobe. The artist wanted to portray C.S.Lewis himself as one of his most known characters, Digory Kirke, protagonist of the first book of the saga in chronological order, and also creator and owner of the magical wardrobe.
As an inscription on the back of the sculpture explains:
The Searcher is based on a literary character called Digory Kirke created by C.S.Lewis. In the Magician’s Nephew it was Digory who made the wardrobe from a beautiful apple tree that had magical properties, which helped open a doorway to Narnia and Aslan.
Unluckily, as you can notice from the pictures, instead of the previous little park, today all around the statue there are some works that are taking away a bit of the atmosphere; despite of this, the sculpture remains still magic.
You can find “The Searcher” in East Belfast, in front of the Holywood Arches Library, in Holywood Road. Below the spot on the map 🙂
