Cathédrale Saint-Nicolas de Nice

When Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich died of meningitis in Nice in 1865, his grieving father built a chapel on the exact spot where his son took his last breath. Nearly fifty years later, that memorial would be joined by Western Europe’s largest Orthodox cathedral, funded by the last Tsar, Nicholas II, who’d be executed by revolutionaries just six years after its consecration. Built to serve five hundred Russian aristocratic families who wintered on the Riviera, the cathedral now belongs to the Russian Federation after a century-long jurisdictional tug-of-war.

The cathedral that architect Mikhail Preobrazhensky built between 1903 and 1912 modeled itself on sixteenth-century Moscow churches, topped with five onion domes and a central cupola said to rise 52 meters, all finished in colorful majolica tile. It replaced an older, smaller church on Rue Longchamp that Nicholas’s grandmother had commissioned decades earlier and that the growing Russian colony had reportedly outgrown. The timing proved unfortunate for continuity: five years after the cathedral opened, the Bolsheviks seized power, and Orthodox communities abroad are generally said to have split from the persecuted church back home, forming jurisdictions independent of Moscow.

That 1917 split appears to be what set up the dispute a century later, though the exact legal mechanics are something I can only report secondhand. By most accounts, a local Russian Orthodox cultural association not affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate had managed the cathedral since 1923, until French courts sided with the Russian Federation as the Empire’s legal successor, reportedly on the grounds that the land had originally been an imperial gift. The transfer is usually dated to around 2011, handing Moscow a Belle Époque cathedral built by a Tsar it doesn’t answer to, on land bought for a prince who never got the chance to grow up.