Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

The main church of Bulgaria and one of the largest Orthodox cathedrals in the Balkans: about five thousand people fit under its vaults. The decision to build it was taken in 1880, soon after the liberation from Ottoman rule, in memory of the Russian soldiers who died in the war of 1877-1878; construction to the design of the St Petersburg architect Alexander Pomerantsev went on from 1904 to 1912. The composition is Neo-Byzantine: a central gilded dome on a high drum, semi-domes around it, and a free-standing bell tower forty-five metres tall with twelve bells. The finishing materials were brought in from all over Europe — Italian marble, Brazilian onyx, German stained glass, Venetian mosaic. Inside it is dim, the walls painted by Bulgarian and Russian artists, and in the crypt there is an icon museum holding the finest collection of Bulgarian icon painting from the ninth century to the nineteenth. The church changed its patron saint's name twice for political reasons and has borne the present one since 1920.

On the map