The world's most magnificent cathedrals: architectural brilliance, historical significance and spiritual essence, from Europe to Latin America.
44 programs
Dedicated to Saint Demetrius, a martyr honoured throughout the Orthodox world, this cathedral gathers the whole vocabulary of Eastern Christian building: a domed volume, an iconostasis separating nave from sanctuary, painted walls, and the slow choreography of the liturgy.
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The cathedral of La Plata was conceived with the planned city it crowns: a vast neo-Gothic church built in exposed brick, among the largest of its kind in the Americas. Begun in the 1880s, it waited more than a century for its twin towers to be completed.
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Built at the lip of a ravine in the province of Shirak, Harichavank pairs a small early church with a larger medieval one. Its carved drums, blind arcades and cross-stones show the continuity of Armenian building across many centuries on a single site.
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The cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky dominates central Sofia with its gilded and green domes. Built in the neo-Byzantine manner in memory of the soldiers fallen in the war that led to Bulgaria's liberation, it also holds one of the country's finest collections of icons.
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Plovdiv is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Europe, and it wears its history in layers. At its centre, the Dzhumaya Mosque, one of the oldest Ottoman mosques in the Balkans, stands a few steps from the excavated end of a Roman stadium.
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Varna's Orthodox cathedral rises above the Black Sea port with domes, a bell tower and a painted interior. The film follows its silhouette, its icons and its place in the life of the city.
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Walls, bastions and a fortress on the hill protect a colonial city of balconies, plazas and churches. Cartagena de Indias, inscribed on the World Heritage List, is filmed as port, stronghold and living town.
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Facing Bogotá's principal square, the Metropolitan Cathedral Basilica presents a sober neoclassical front and a vast, luminous interior. The film follows its architecture, its chapels and its civic role.
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Founded by the Dominican order in the Spanish colonial period, the Church of Santo Domingo pairs a heavy, sober exterior with a nave of altarpieces, sculpture and painted decoration.
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Dedicated to the Protection of the Mother of God, this Crimean cathedral combines the picturesque massing of the Russian revival with an interior of icons, gilding and candlelight.
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Dedicated to Prince Vladimir, whose conversion tradition situates in Crimea, this cathedral combines a monumental neo-Byzantine exterior with a solemn, marble-lined interior.
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Founded by Greek settlers and inhabited for close to two millennia, Tauric Chersonesos preserves streets, walls, a theatre and basilica columns above the sea. A World Heritage site.
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Twin towers, flying buttresses and stone beasts drawn from the fauna of Ecuador: the Basilica of the National Vow is the boldest religious building of the Andean capital.
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Begun soon after the Spanish founding of Quito, San Francisco covers an entire quarter: church, cloisters, chapels and a great atrium, filled with the art of the Quito school.
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Facing the Plaza Grande, the Metropolitan Cathedral is one of the oldest in South America, a layered building of chapels, altarpieces and tombs at the centre of Ecuadorian history.
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The principal cathedral of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Addis Ababa combines carved stone, stained glass and imperial tombs, including that of the country's last emperor.
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Known simply as La Major, Marseille's cathedral rises in bands of green and white stone at the edge of the Joliette docks. Built in the nineteenth century on a monumental scale, it embodies the ambitions of a port at the height of its power.
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Raised on a hill above Kutaisi at the height of the Georgian kingdom, Bagrati Cathedral was reduced to a shell by an explosion and later rebuilt. Its history makes it a case study in how nations restore their monuments.
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Completed at the turn of the twenty-first century, the Holy Trinity Cathedral dominates the skyline of Tbilisi. Its scale, its gilded dome and its terraced setting make it a statement about faith and nationhood.
View details →A Lithuanian church placed under a Marian title welcomes its faithful for prayer and for the great feasts. The film observes its architecture, its images of the Virgin and the devotional practices that give the building its meaning.
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Dedicated to Saint Tryphon, patron of Kotor, the cathedral stands at the heart of the walled city on the Bay of Kotor. Its twin bell towers, Romanesque interior and treasury make it the principal monument of the old town.
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Lima's Plaza Mayor was traced out when the city was founded in 1535, and its cathedral has been rebuilt again and again after the earthquakes that punctuate Peruvian history. Together they form the ceremonial heart of the capital's historic centre.
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Raised in honour of the Immaculate Conception, this Philippine basilica remains a centre of Marian devotion and a landmark of its city. Its facade, bell tower and richly furnished interior speak of a faith deeply woven into local identity.
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Completed at the turn of the twenty-first century, the basilica of Lichen Stary is among the largest churches in Europe. Its immense dome, free-standing tower and colonnades were raised to receive the pilgrims of one of Poland's foremost Marian shrines.
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Raised in the old walled town of Faro after the Christian conquest of the Algarve, the cathedral rests on ground already sacred in Roman and Islamic times. First part of a two-episode study of its architecture and history.
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Second part of the study of Faro Cathedral, devoted to its interior: Baroque gilded carving, blue and white azulejo panels, side chapels and the organ, all set within a Gothic frame repeatedly repaired after earthquake and war.
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Founded in the twelfth century after the capture of Lisbon, the cathedral presents a Romanesque facade flanked by two towers. Its Gothic cloister covers excavations that have uncovered Roman, Islamic and medieval layers of the city.
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Massive, crenellated and set on the highest point of the old city, Porto Cathedral began as a Romanesque fortress-church in the twelfth century. Its Gothic cloister, tiled walls and silver altarpiece trace eight centuries of additions.
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On the bank of the Moskva River stands the largest Orthodox cathedral in Russia. Built in the 19th century to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon's invasion, demolished under Stalin in 1931 and rebuilt in the 1990s, it is a monument to memory as much as to faith.
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Dedicated to Saint Catherine, this Russian cathedral gathers the elements of a working place of worship: a marked facade in the streetscape, a nave shaped for liturgy, icons, candlelight and the daily rhythm of a congregation.
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Dedicated to the Kazan icon of the Mother of God, among the most venerated images in Russian Orthodoxy, this cathedral is filmed as architecture and as living devotion: facade and colonnade, nave and side chapels, candlelight and the movement of the faithful.
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Designed by Auguste de Montferrand and built between 1818 and 1858, Saint Isaac's Cathedral is the largest church in Saint Petersburg. Its granite colonnades, malachite and lapis columns and gilded dome make it a landmark of imperial ambition.
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Dedicated to the Ascension, this Russian cathedral is filmed as architecture and as living liturgy: the vertical drive of the exterior, the ordering of the nave, the icon screen, and the light that shapes the interior through the day.
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The Dormition of the Mother of God is the dedication of many of Russia's principal cathedrals. This one is filmed with attention to architecture and worship: white walls and domes outside, icons, gilding and candlelight within.
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One of the great neoclassical cathedrals of Saint Petersburg, the Trinity Cathedral is instantly recognisable by its deep blue domes strewn with gilded stars, rising above a quarter long associated with the imperial guard.
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Rising above Liberty Square, the Catholic parish church of the Name of Mary gives Novi Sad its most recognisable silhouette. Neo-Gothic in style, it is crowned by a steep roof of glazed and patterned tiles.
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With its twin towers and restrained baroque façade, the church of St Theresa of Ávila is the oldest major monument of Subotica and the seat of its Catholic diocese - a sober counterpoint to the city's later architecture.
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Devotion to the Sacred Heart produced some of Spain's most emphatic religious buildings. This sanctuary, monumental in scale and prominently sited, is filmed as both architecture and as a place of continuing pilgrimage.
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The Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, known to everyone in Lviv as the Latin Cathedral, is the Gothic heart of a World Heritage city. Begun in the fourteenth century, it carries centuries of Baroque additions over its medieval frame.
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St Volodymyr's Cathedral honours the ruler whose conversion brought Christianity to Kyivan Rus. Its domes, painted interiors and gilded iconostasis place it in the long Byzantine tradition that has shaped Ukrainian church building.
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Seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury and mother church of the Anglican Communion, Canterbury Cathedral has drawn pilgrims since the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170. Its Gothic quire and medieval glass anchor a World Heritage site.
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Set in a hollow beside the River Taff on the edge of Cardiff, Llandaff Cathedral was devastated by a wartime landmine and rebuilt around Jacob Epstein's aluminium Christ in Majesty, one of the boldest interventions in a British church.
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Facing the principal square of Maracay, in the fertile Aragua valleys of northern Venezuela, the cathedral occupies the ground on which the town organised itself. Its white facade and bell towers remain the city's civic reference point.
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In the province of Ninh Binh stands one of the most unusual churches in Asia: a Catholic cathedral built in the late nineteenth century in the form of a Vietnamese temple, with sweeping tiled roofs, stone pillars and massive ironwood columns.
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