Moments from Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

The cathedral standing in Moscow today is, technically, a reconstruction: the original, built across the nineteenth century to commemorate Russia's survival of Napoleon's 1812 invasion, was dynamited by Stalin's government in 1931, which planned to replace it with a colossal Palace of Soviets topped by a statue of Lenin taller than the Empire State Building. That project collapsed under its own engineering ambitions and the outbreak of war, and the site sat for decades as, bizarrely, the world's largest open-air swimming pool before the cathedral was rebuilt from scratch in the 1990s, an almost exact replica of the demolished original, gold domes and all.

Inside, the scale of the marble, gilding, and religious painting is meant to overwhelm rather than invite quiet contemplation of individual works, this is architecture and decoration functioning as a single unified statement rather than a gallery of discrete pieces. Modest dress is expected, shoulders and knees covered, and women are generally expected to cover their heads inside. The building's own history, destroyed, replaced by a swimming pool, then rebuilt as a near-copy of what Stalin destroyed, is arguably as striking a story as anything on its walls, worth knowing before you walk in rather than treating it as simply another grand cathedral.