Uspenski Cathedral

This guide to Uspenski Cathedral in Helsinki begins with seven hundred thousand bricks barged across the Baltic from the ruined Russian fortress of Bomarsund, destroyed by British and French warships during the Crimean War. It follows architect Aleksei Gornostayev, who drew the plans based on a sixteenth-century church near Moscow but died in 1862 before construction began, leaving Ivan Varnek to finish the design. Barge after barge of that fortress brick came up the hill above Katajanokka's harbor, stacking a defeated empire's stonework into something built to last.