Cathedral Domes #3of3

In Puglia, the very heel of Italy, the city of Manduria consists of many white or light colored, mostly one-story buildings, but there is a fine Romanesque cathedral with a multi-colored tile dome. Another church with a sign that said it was 1,000 years old, was near an old wall dating from Messapian days.

The monasteries and churches of the Greek Orthodox Church have a distinctive architecture. There are layers of brick and stonework, with horizontal lines of different color brick, laid in established patterns. The domes are distinctive, and the radius, or curve, are all similar, but the shape of the dome is different from the style and shape of domes on churches in other countries. Ossios Loukás (Holy Luke), Greece, is one of the better examples of this architectural style.

The St. Sophia Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey, originally a Byzantine Christian church, became a mosque in 1453, and the mosaic murals of saints and angels were covered with colored plaster. In 1935 (500 years later), the plaster was carefully removed when the Turkish government declared it a museum. The dome of St. Sophia Mosque is huge, and high, and old, and so large that building engineers say it couldn’t be built, and will not stay in one piece if it were. Another “bumblebee” building that has existed ‘lo these many centuries.

Berlin’s Protestant Cathedral, “… den neubarocken Dom …,” “The new baroque Cathedral,” and its predecessors, date back 500 years. Completed about 1905 and set afire by a direct hit by a bomb in 1944, this cathedral was extensively damaged in WW II. Repairs and restoration took place in the 1950s, the late 1970s to early ‘80s, and the inside of Berlin’s Cathedral was planned to be completed by 1992. This cathedral and its beautiful dome, are reflected in the golden windows of the building next door.

When we first visited Dresden, Germany, the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), formally a huge single dome building of baroque design, had lain as a mound of rubble with portions of a wall and an arch soaring into the sky, since the horrendous bombing of February 1945. During the next visit we saw the beginnings of the renovation that is planned to be completed by the year 2006, Dresden’s 800th birthday. If all goes well, the Frauenkirche’s 312-feet-tall lanterned dome will once again dominate the splendors of this exquisite city’s skyline.