Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

– This cathedral, the tallest Orthodox church in the world (the largest being the Temple of Saint Savain Belgrade), was blown up on orders from Stalin in 1931, to provide a site for building the gargantuan Palace of the Soviets, to be crowned by a 100-m-high statue of Lenin. The project ran into engineering and geological difficulties (the area used to be a swamp), then the War intervened, and the place was ceded to a year-round open-air swimming pool. The pool was razed and the cathedral rebuilt only after the fall of the Soviet Union, in the mid-1990s, and re-consecrated in 2000. There is an extensive museum underneath the cathedral documenting its history (the original was started in 1839 and consecrated in 1883). Today, it is the seat of the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in his role as Bishop of Moscow.

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