Patriarchal Cathedral St. Alexander Nevsky

Gilded domes over central Sofia mark the largest church in the city and one of the largest Orthodox cathedrals in the Balkans. Built to a neo-Byzantine design and completed in 1912, it was raised as a memorial to the Russian and Bulgarian soldiers who fell in the war of 1877–78, and it is the seat of the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Its crypt holds a celebrated collection of icons. The interior — marble, alabaster, onyx, and a vast reverberation — has made it a place where sacred and operatic voices are occasionally heard outside the liturgy.