St. Cassian Church

When this medieval church’s congregation relocated to the village below in the early 1600s, it became what it remains today: a burial church. Its patron saint, Cassian of Imola, was a 4th-century schoolteacher martyred by his own students, who stabbed him to death with their iron styluses, the pointed writing tools of Roman classrooms, over a slow two days. The pulpit, installed in 1650, arrived just after the Bündner Wirren, two decades of religious warfare that turned the Grisons into a battleground between Catholic and Protestant forces. The church itself is older than that entire conflict by nearly a thousand years, with parts of the structure dating back to somewhere around 750 to 790 AD.

Its strangest visitor arrived long after the fighting stopped. In August 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen photographed the church while passing through on holiday, an entirely conventional glass-plate image of a building and its cemetery framed against the snow-covered Glarus Alps. Three months later, he’d discover the rays that would make his name synonymous with seeing straight through solid matter. St. Cassian got captured on film just before the man who took the photo changed what photography itself could reveal.