According to Atlas Obscura, Luxembourg City in the early sixteen hundreds was under siege—literally and spiritually. Plague, famine, and religious conflict ravaged the Spanish Netherlands enclave. In December of sixteen twenty-four, a Jesuit priest organized a procession to erect a statue of the Virgin and Child outside the city's fortifications, hoping to restore hope and counter the Protestant Reformation. The statue of "Our Lady of the Glacis," named for the fortification slope where it stood, became a pilgrimage destination after a "Book of Miracles" was published in sixteen thirty-nine. That same year, an eight-day celebration—the Octave—began to accommodate the crowds, a tradition that continues today. When French forces invaded the Duchy in seventeen ninety-four, the statue was moved to safety at a Jesuit church, soon to become Luxembourg's cathedral. The chapel itself didn't survive: French revolutionaries razed it to the ground two years later. A new neo-Gothic chapel was built in eighteen eighty-five, one hundred fifty metres south of the original site. Then, in twenty sixteen, construction work on a tramway uncovered the ruins of that first chapel. Now, nearly four hundred years after its destruction, the chapel's footprint is marked in paving stones, and two tram tracks run directly through where believers once prayed. The statue remains the patron saint of Luxembourg, and the Octave remains a national pilgrimage, connecting modern Luxembourg to a tradition born in crisis.

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