Christ Saviour Golden Domes Countdown Timer

The scale of this thing does not come across in photographs until you are standing under it and realize the gold dome is bigger than most buildings you have been inside. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. White stone, five domes, and a sun that day so hard it turned the gold into a second sun. What gets me is the history underneath. This is not the original. The original was dynamited in 1931, the site sat as an outdoor swimming pool for decades, and then in the nineties they rebuilt the whole thing from scratch, stone by stone, painting by painting. You can argue about whether a replica carries the same weight. Standing there in the heat with light coming off that gold and tour groups shuffling past, I stopped wanting to argue. It is enormous and it is beautiful and it is here now. From the bridge the domes look like they are floating, the white walls underneath almost disappearing in all that glare. Somebody decided to put a cathedral back where a cathedral used to be, and thousands of people came to look at it. There is something stubborn and hopeful in that.