The Holy-Trinity Cathedral

Since last year we have a second Orthodox Cathedral in Paris, the Holy-Trinity Cathedral. It should have been inaugurated in the presence of Vladimir Putin, but some political disagreement led to Mr. Putin’s visit being cancelled. Anyhow, the Cathedral is there and also a Russian Orthodox Spiritual and Cultural Centre. (Mr. Putin recently made a more unofficial visit after his meeting with Emmanuel Macron at Versailles in May.)

The other Paris Orthodox Cathedral is the Alexandre-Nevsky on which I already posted (here). You may ask yourself why there are two Orthodox Cathedrals in Paris. Well, if I understand things correctly, the Orthodox Church has some kind of highest leadership by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, in Paris thus represented by the Alexandre-Nevsky Cathedral, but there are altogether some 14 patriarchates (Alexandria, Antioch…) and Russia is one of them (with some subdivisions). This obviously gives the right also to this new church to be a “Cathedral”. It seems also that the Alexandre-Nevsky Cathedral may be more linked to the “White Russians”, once opposed to the Russian Revolution.

The golden bulbs have all the typical tree-bar cross on top.  

The interior is beautiful, but fairly modest, compared to other major Orthodox churches, but it seems that the decoration is not yet complete.

I previously posted also about two other more modest orthodox churches, the Saint-Serge-de-Radonège (here), obviously also sorting under Constantinople, and the Saint- Seraphin-de-Sarov (here).    

The geographic situation of the new Cathedral is very central, on the Seine River, and the Eiffel Tower is quite close.

Originally, the winner of the design competition for the Cathedral was won by Manuel Nunez Yanowsky (see previous post about the “Michelangelo building”), but some local authorities were against it and the chosen architect was Jean-Michel Willemotte.