The magnificent Grade-II listed church, which boasts delightful domes, marble pillars, chandeliers and stained glass windows, was built in the
neo-Byzantine style by Henry Sumners.
While many new buildings had modern elements from then on, Greek Orthodox churches were still mainly built in the
neo-byzantine style.
Yet, as is clear from Vasileios Marinis' illuminating essay on the
neo-Byzantine Greek icon painter Fotis Kontoglou (1895-1965), tradition is equally important.
The result, finished in 1935, is convincingly
neo-Byzantine and appropriate in scale, with good colours and well-drawn angels and other figures.
Their
neo-Byzantine splendor contrasts with the static that nearly occludes the degraded footage of Roth reading his poetry, a tribute to that artist's own half-rotten works.
The city has many significant historic buildings, such as the
neo-Byzantine Aleksander Nevski Church with its bold gold dome and striking Sveta Nedelya Cathedral, admired for its vibrant murals and an equally colourful history.
But only four of its five
neo-Byzantine pavillions, arranged around an enormous Italianate clock tower, were ever built before the pounds 250,000 budget ran out.
Westminster Cathedral London's only example of
neo-Byzantine architecture and the principal Roman Catholic church offers a magnificent campanile that emerges 274 feet into the sky.
And towering above everything is the awesome
neo-Byzantine Notre-Dame de la Garde basilica.
The first is the huge
neo-Byzantine basilica dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Montmartre, built at the behest of devout Catholics as an act of expiation for the sins that had led to France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the sacrilegious excesses of the Parisian Communards during their uprising in 1871.
It was fitting that an exhibition of his work, titled
Neo-Byzantine Redneck, included displays of plastic kitsch alongside a DNA sample in a reliquary constructed of wood and copper, with a glass vial holding unspecified bodily fluid.
Not to be missed is the Alexander Memorial Church which is an impressive
neo-Byzantine building right in the heart of the city commemorating the czar who drove out the Turks in the 19th century.