Cathédrale Saint-Alexandre-Nevsky de Paris Audio guide

Welcome to the cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky, on a quiet street in the eighth arrondissement of Paris. It looks unexpected here, and it is. Russian Orthodox worshippers in Paris began with a small oratory on Rue de Berri, opened in 1816. As the Russian community grew through the nineteenth century, that little chapel could no longer hold them. In 1847 the chaplain of the Russian Embassy, Father Joseph Vassiliev, set out to build a permanent church. The Russian government was slow, and French bureaucracy was slower, but Emperor Napoleon III finally gave his consent. Work began in 1859, and the church was consecrated on the eleventh of September, 1861. That makes it the first purpose-built Russian Orthodox place of worship in all of France. The date was chosen with care, the day before the feast of its patron saint, a Russian prince and national hero.

Photo: ShadowMitia · CC BY 4.0

Five dark towers rise from the roof, each crowned with a gilded bulb and an Orthodox cross. The man who drove the project, the diplomat Joseph Vassiliev, called the style Byzantine Muscovite. Byzantine is the body of the church, Muscovite is the silhouette on top. The five towers stand for Christ and the four Evangelists. The gilded bulbs beneath the crosses are meant to suggest candle flames, carrying the prayers of worshippers up to heaven. The central tower reaches about forty-eight metres and carries the eight-pointed Russian Orthodox cross. The design came from Roman Kouzmine, chief architect of the Russian imperial court, working with the engineer Ivan Strohm. From a Paris street, that cluster of onion domes is unmistakable.

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Every visitor and worshipper climbs these stone steps to the covered porch. The building behind them was paid for in an unusual way. Tsar Alexander II gave from his personal purse, roughly one hundred and fifty thousand gold francs. The rest came from a subscription drive across Russia and among Russian communities around the world. What makes the effort remarkable is who gave. Orthodox donors gave, but so did Catholics and Protestants in France, where interest in the project ran high. A church for one faith, raised by the generosity of three. The ornate carved porch at the top of the steps has welcomed worshippers since the eighteen-sixties.

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Above the entrance, set into the curved pediment, Christ raises his hand in blessing against a field of gold. The gold ground is pure Byzantine, the half of Vassiliev's formula that belongs to the body of the church. This image is the first thing a visitor meets on the way in. The street outside has seen its own ceremonies. In April 1915, during the First World War, a Russian ambulance convoy was blessed here on Rue Daru by an archpriest. Crowds filled the street to watch the priest bless the vehicles before they left for the front. It was one sign of how deeply this foreign church had taken root in Paris.

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Inside, the plan is a Greek cross, with each of the four arms ending in a rounded apse. The inspiration was the great Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Every surface carries paintings, gilding and polychrome decoration, and a great chandelier hangs over the crossing. This room was built for Orthodox liturgy, and services in the main cathedral are still sung in Church Slavonic. The nave holds the worshippers, gathered under the vaults for the service. One famous ceremony took place here in July 1918. Pablo Picasso married the Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova in this church. The witnesses were Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, three of the leading writers of Paris.

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High above, the cupola opens into a ring of painted figures around a dark blue centre. The walls around the church carry murals by D. Sorokine and Feodor Bronnikov. They show the great events of Christian history and the moments of the liturgy. The Adoration of the Shepherds, the Sermon on the Mount, the Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, the Last Supper. In the apses hang canvases by Alexeï Bogolioubov, including Christ Walking on the Waters and Christ Preaching at the Lake of Tiberias. For a congregation, all this painting worked like a book in images, telling the story of the faith to those who could not read it.

Guilhem Vellut from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0

Facing the nave stands the iconostasis, a tall gilded screen covered in icons. In an Orthodox church it does a precise job: it separates the altar area, reserved for the clergy, from the worshippers in the nave. It has three portals. The central one is the Royal Portal, and only the clergy may pass through it. Its doors carry icons of the Annunciation and the four Evangelists, painted by Evgraf Sorokine. To the right of those doors stand Christ, Alexander Nevsky himself, and the Archangel Michael. To the left are the Virgin Mary, Saint Stephen and Saint Nicholas of Myra. Higher up, the Holy Trinity looks down over the whole screen, painted by Pavel Sorokine.

Guilhem Vellut from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0

Candles burn beside the cross at the heart of the sanctuary. After the Russian revolution, this church changed in meaning. In 1922 Archbishop Euloge made it the seat of his diocese of émigré parishes, and it became a spiritual refuge for White Russian exiles in Paris. It was also where the community buried its great ones. The funeral of Ivan Turgenev was held here in 1883, long before the exile years. Wassily Kandinsky was mourned here in 1944, and the film director Andrei Tarkovsky in the late nineteen-eighties. For more than a century and a half, this has been the spiritual home of Russians in Paris.

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