Saint Stephen’s Bulgarian Orthodox Church

The iron structure of Saint Stephen’s Bulgarian Orthodox Church glows gold against the waterfront because its frame consists entirely of prefabricated cast iron plates bolted together. Ottoman authorities denied the Bulgarian minority permission to build a stone church, so the community commissioned the structure in Vienna in eighteen seventy-one. Workers shipped the iron parts down the Danube and across the Black Sea, assembling the pieces on-site in less than two years. It remains one of the few surviving iron churches in the world.