Few buildings carry the weight of a nation's history as visibly as the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Conceived in the 19th century as a thanksgiving for the defeat of Napoleon's invasion, it rose above the Moskva River as the largest Orthodox church in the country, its white marble walls and gilded domes closing the view along the river's bend. In 1931 it was demolished on Stalin's orders, and the site was later turned into an open-air swimming pool. In the 1990s the cathedral was rebuilt to the original design and consecrated in 2000. Filmed in 4K, this programme follows the building's silhouette from the water, moves through the vast interior and its galleries of painted scenes, and reads the cathedral as a record of destruction, memory and reconstruction in modern Russia.
