The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Sacred Places in the World
7 places in 6 countries · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful 19th-century sacred places in the world are Saint Isaac's Cathedral (Russia), Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia (Bulgaria) and Kalyazin Bell Tower (Russia). The list covers 7 19th-century sacred places in 6 countries. Russia has the most, with 2. Last updated 6 October 2026.
The nineteenth century built its sacred places in the languages of the past. Neo-Byzantine, neoclassical, Gothic and Ottoman revival styles let empires and young nations claim a history, while new industrial wealth paid for gilded domes, imported marble and stained glass on a scale earlier builders rarely reached. The result is an age of revival that produced some of the most richly decorated churches, mosques and monasteries anywhere.
Saint Isaac's Cathedral in Saint Petersburg took forty years to build under Auguste de Montferrand; its gilded dome dominates the city, and columns of malachite and lapis lazuli frame the iconostasis. Sofia's Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, a neo-Byzantine church of green and gold domes, honours the Russian soldiers who died in the war that freed Bulgaria in 1878. In Cairo, the Muhammad Ali Mosque brought Ottoman domes and alabaster walls to the Citadel.
Further east, the Nasir-ol-Molk Mosque in Shiraz fills with coloured morning light from its stained-glass windows, earning it the name Pink Mosque. In Mandalay, King Mindon had the Buddhist scriptures carved on 729 marble slabs at the Kuthodaw Pagoda, each sheltered in its own small shrine. Pena Palace in Sintra rose on the ruins of a monastery, and the Kalyazin Bell Tower on the Volga now stands alone in the water, the rest of its town lost beneath a reservoir.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Saint Isaac's Cathedral | Cathedral | Russia | ✓ |
| 2 | Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia | Cathedral | Bulgaria | |
| 3 | Kalyazin Bell Tower | Bell tower | Russia | |
| 4 | Kuthodaw Pagoda | Stupa | Myanmar | |
| 5 | Pena Palace | Palace | Portugal | ✓ |
| 6 | Nasir-ol-Molk Mosque | Mosque | Iran | |
| 7 | Muhammad Ali Mosque | Mosque | Egypt |
01 Saint Isaac's Cathedral
Russia · 0.9 km from Saint Petersburg59.934° N 30.306° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Florstein ( Telegram: WikiPhoto.Space ) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The gilded dome of Saint Isaac's rises 101.5 metres over the square that bears its name, and on a clear day it is the reference point for half of central Saint Petersburg. The building is the fourth church on the site, commissioned by Alexander I and entrusted to Auguste de Montferrand, a French-born architect trained in the studio of Charles Percier. Construction ran from 1818 to 1858; Montferrand died within about a month of the consecration, having given four decades of his career to a single commission. The result is late Neoclassicism on an imperial scale: a Greek-cross plan, four identical octastyle porticoes, a central dome on a tall colonnaded drum and four smaller cupolas.
Did you know? The cathedral is dedicated to Saint Isaac of Dalmatia because Peter the Great was born on that saint's feast day.
02 Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia
Свети Александър Невски
Bulgaria · 1.9 km from Sofia42.696° N 23.333° E
Image by Michael_Kastelic from Pixabay The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral is Sofia's great gilded landmark and the cathedral church of the Patriarch of Bulgaria. It was conceived as a memorial to the Russian soldiers who died in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, the war that ended Ottoman rule over Bulgaria, and it bears the name of the medieval Russian prince and saint Alexander Nevsky. The foundation stone was laid in 1882, but most of the building went up between 1904 and 1912 to designs by the Russian architect Alexander Pomerantsev; the church was consecrated only in 1924. During the First World War, when Bulgaria and Russia were on opposite sides, it briefly carried the names of Saints Cyril and Methodius instead.
Did you know? The foundation stone was laid on 3 March 1882, four years to the day after the Treaty of San Stefano that restored a Bulgarian state.
03 Kalyazin Bell Tower
Russia57.244° N 37.857° E
Image by Olga_Fil from Pixabay In the middle of the Volga near Kalyazin, a slender five-tiered bell tower stands on a small island of its own, with water where the town square used to be. It is the belfry of the cathedral of St Nicholas, and it has become one of the most familiar images of Russia's drowned towns: a classical tower, about 74.5 metres tall, rising without a church from the river, its reflection doubled in still water.
Did you know? The belfry once held twelve bells, the largest weighing 1,038 poods, about 17 tonnes, cast in 1895 to mark Nicholas II's accession.
04 Kuthodaw Pagoda
Myanmar · 4.7 km from Mandalay22.005° N 96.113° E
Image by tonywuphotography from Pixabay At the foot of Mandalay Hill, a golden stupa rises above a sea of small white shrines. Kuthodaw Pagoda – the "Royal Merit" – was built by King Mindon as part of the foundation of his new royal capital of Mandalay; its central stupa, gilded above the terraces, stands about 57 metres high and is modelled on the Shwezigon Pagoda near Bagan. Construction began in 1860, and the crowning umbrella, the hti, was raised in July 1862.
Did you know? Each marble slab is about 1.5 metres tall, just over a metre wide and 13 centimetres thick, so the whole 'book' has 1,460 stone pages.
05 Pena Palace
Portugal · 22.3 km from Lisbon38.788° N 9.391° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Singa Hitam · CC BY 2.0 Pena Palace looks like a dream that someone decided to build. From the woods above Sintra it rises on a rocky peak in a jumble of towers, domes, crenellations and terraces, painted in strong ochre yellow and deep red, with a clock tower, onion-topped turrets and battlements that seem to belong to five different countries at once. It is one of the most flamboyant monuments of European Romanticism, and it was built by a king consort with an artist's temperament.
Did you know? A cross has marked the nearby High Cross, at 528 metres the highest point of the Sintra hills, since King John III first raised one in 1522.
06 Nasir-ol-Molk Mosque
Iran · 3.2 km from Shiraz29.609° N 52.548° E
Image by engelbachm from Pixabay The Nasir-ol-Molk Mosque in Shiraz is a building made for one hour of the day. Early in the morning the low sun comes through the stained-glass windows of its winter prayer hall and throws pools of red, blue, yellow and green across the Persian carpets, the columns and the people sitting in the light. For a short time the whole hall seems to be lit from inside a kaleidoscope. It is the image that made the mosque famous far beyond Iran, and the reason visitors arrive at opening time.
Did you know? The stained-glass windows belong to a Persian tradition called orsi, wooden sash frames filled with coloured glass that serve as a source of light rather than as pictures.
07 Muhammad Ali Mosque
Egypt · 2.8 km from Cairo30.029° N 31.260° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay High on the spur of the Cairo Citadel, the Mosque of Muhammad Ali is the building that gives the city its skyline from almost every angle: a stack of grey domes and half-domes held between two needle-thin minarets that rise more than 80 metres, each only about three metres wide at the base. It was founded around 1830 for Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Ottoman governor who made himself the real master of Egypt, and was finished in 1857. What makes it remarkable is how deliberately foreign it is. Cairo had centuries of its own Mamluk tradition, and a French architect, Pascal Coste, first proposed a design in that local idiom; it was set aside in favour of a purely Ottoman plan modelled on the great imperial mosques of Istanbul such as the Şehzade and the Sultan Ahmed. The designer who carried it out is not known for certain.
Did you know? Alabaster panels were later stripped from the upper walls for the palaces of Abbas I, and the bare walls were covered with wood painted to look like marble.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful 19th-century sacred places in the world?
- On our list, Saint Isaac's Cathedral (Russia) ranks first, followed by Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia (Bulgaria) and Kalyazin Bell Tower (Russia).
- Which country has the most 19th-century sacred places in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Russia (2), Bulgaria (1) and Egypt (1).
- Why is the Nasir-ol-Molk Mosque called the Pink Mosque?
- Its prayer hall has stained-glass windows, and in the early morning sunlight passing through them casts red, pink and blue light across the carpets. Pink tiles in the courtyard add to the name.
- What is called the world's largest book?
- The Kuthodaw Pagoda in Mandalay, where the complete Buddhist Tipitaka was carved on 729 marble slabs in the 1860s, each housed in its own small stupa.
- Why does the Kalyazin Bell Tower stand in water?
- When the Uglich Reservoir was filled on the Volga in the late 1930s, the old town of Kalyazin and its monastery were flooded. Only the bell tower was left standing.
- How many 19th-century sacred places are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 7 19th-century sacred places in 6 countries. Russia has the most, with 2.