Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Paris

The five gilded domes of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral rise above the rooftops of the eighth arrondissement in a sharp cluster of Byzantine onion shapes. Consecrated in eighteen sixty-one, this was the first permanent Russian Orthodox church built in Paris. When the novelist Ivan Turgenev attended the opening ceremony, he stood amidst a congregation that included the cream of the Russian Empire, all gathered to secure a spiritual home in the heart of a city that was then the center of the world.