Catedral Metropolitana Ortodoxa Antioquina de São Paulo

This guide to the Antiochian Orthodox cathedral in São Paulo opens with an odd fact: the Byzantine dome opened for worship in 1954 but sat unconsecrated for twenty-four years. To explain the wait, it traces the community that built it back to Ottoman persecution driving Orthodox families out of Syria and Lebanon in 1890, a rented-hall liturgy in 1897, and a small church funded by one merchant whose bronze bell still hangs inside. It follows how that growing congregation outgrew its first home and modeled this one on Hagia Sophia.