Saint Stephen’s Bulgarian Orthodox Church

This guide to Saint Stephen's Bulgarian Orthodox Church in Istanbul traces how Istanbul's Bulgarian community, worshipping for generations under Greek Patriarchate authority, finally got a church of their own through the Ottoman official Stefan Bogoridi, who donated his own residence on the Golden Horn. After fire damaged the first wooden church, it follows the Viennese firm that proposed casting the entire building from iron, and the five hundred tons of prefabricated sections shipped down the Danube and across the Black Sea to be bolted together at the water's edge. Look for the three domes and forty-meter belfry, every surface worked in iron.