Architecture

Dublin and Kilkenny

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The last days of 2022 saw me make my first visit to Dublin since 2013 and to Kilkenny since, I think, 1995! A trip to interview the delightful (and Most Rev’d) John Neill for my doctorate. I did a day trip from Belfast to Kilkenny by train, which I don’t particularly recommend giving the timings, … Read more

View from Yerevan in The Tablet

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It’s good to be in print in this week’s The Tablet (11 August 2022 edition) with a “View from Yerevan” – a piece about beautiful town planning, the revival and the absence of churches, losing a war, refugees from far away, and having one of the world’s most difficult geopolitical positions. It’s easy enough to … Read more

Admit It, You Think Judas is Right: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 3rd April 2022 (Fifth Sunday of Lent)

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Readings – Isaiah 43: 16–21; John 12: 1–8

“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” 

Admit it, a large part of you agrees with Judas when he asks Jesus this question… keep that in mind, we’ll come back to it!

A view of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery from the bell tower of St Sophia’s in Kyiv, 13 August 2017.
St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, Kyiv, 13 August 2017. © Gerry Lynch

If you have seen television news reports from Kyiv, you will doubtless have seen the magnificent St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery. A huge trapezium of sky-blue with white vertical stripes, all capped by seven golden domes, and next to it an even bigger clock-tower in similar colours with a truly huge golden dome on top. It was originally built towards the end of the 11th Century, a few decades before our own St John’s, and like our St John’s it was developed in fits and starts over many centuries. It was hugely expanded in the ornate Ukrainian Baroque style which make Kyiv’s churches and monasteries a delight during the 18th Century, the period when many of our beautifully carved wall memorials in St John’s were erected.

What I’ll tell you next is hard to believe, although we have learned in recent weeks the depth of hatred Stalin held for Ukrainian culture and identity, but those wonderful 18th Century baroque extensions were used as an excuse for the Soviet authorities to declare the monastery historically “inauthentic” in 1934, and it was demolished, replaced by a modern office block housing the administrative headquarters of Soviet Ukraine. What we see today has been entirely rebuilt over the last thirty years, as faithfully as possible to what was there before.

On one level, buildings are just stones: but they are also things that can move people to tears through their beauty, and be the repositories of the soul of a nation, or a family, or a faith. Stalin, among others, understood how much buildings mattered – St Michael’s was one of thousands of churches destroyed across the Soviet Union in the 1930s, as the state tried to destroy Christianity. But he also understood the power of beautiful buildings to lift up and renew. Much of the centre of Kyiv was destroyed during the Second World War, and it was the site of one of the first rebuilding efforts in the immediate post-War years, especially around the famous Maidan, a handsome cityscape of optimistic wedding-cake towers and neo-classical pillars. The aim was to incarnate in stone the beauty of Communist ideals of progress and enlightenment, and inspire the people of Ukraine to play their part in rebuilding the USSR after the depredations of Hitler.

Domes of St Michael's in Kyiv
Domes of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, 10 August 2017. © Gerry Lynch.

Let us turn the clock back even further, before the construction of St Michael’s in Kyiv and St John’s in Devizes, before even the times when Christ walked the earth, to the time when the Scythians were the people who dominated the great Eurasian plain, from Ukraine in the west as far as Mongolia in the east. A few years ago there was an exhibition of their art at the British Museum. The Scythians had no writing, but worked gold with exquisite skill, the equal of the Greeks and Persians of the same period. Complex depictions of Tree of Life, sometimes a foot high, reveal a people with a keen sense of spirituality and the wonder of creation. The instinct for beauty seems to be hard-wired into us.

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Wisdom and the Cross: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 12 September 2021 (The Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity)

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The modern Coventry Cathedral alongside the ruins of the original, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch

Readings – Wisdom 7:26 – 8:1; Mark 8:27–38

“She is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On a bright weekday morning three summers ago, I began my day with Morning Prayer at Coventry Cathedral. Coventry was a convenient place for an overnight break on the long overland journey between Salisbury and Belfast, and I had long wanted to see the Cathedral. I was able to talk my way into spending the hour between the end of the service and the start of public visiting wandering an empty Cathedral on my own, with my camera and tripod.

John Piper’s great Baptistery Window at Coventry Cathedral, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch
John Piper’s great Baptistery Window at Coventry Cathedral, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch

If you haven’t yet been there, I recommend a visit, and also making the effort to visit in the morning, for that is the time when John Piper’s baptistery window is at its best, ablaze with sun from the east, all twenty-eight metres of it.

Just occasionally people tell me they don’t like Coventry Cathedral. I couldn’t disagree more; few church buildings on earth incarnate the reality of the Resurrection more powerfully.

The parish church Cathedral of St Michael, one of the finest medieval parish churches in Europe, was blown to bits during The Blitz on 14 November 1940. As he went into the ruined Cathedral the morning after the destruction, the then Provost, Richard Howard, was struck by what he called “the deep certainty that as the Cathedral had been crucified with Christ, so it would rise again with Him.”

Less than twenty years later, the very different modernist Cathedral was dedicated, also to St Michael, surrounded by the still imposing ruins of 14th Century building, and incomprehensible without their presence.

Coventry Cathedral also showcases two interconnected British revivals of the two decades after the end of the Second World War – a revival of Christian faith and a revival of high culture. Unquestionably it was the high point of British modernism in the visual arts and architecture: Basil Spence’s cathedral housing John Piper’s windows, Graham Sutherland’s tapestry, still in 2021 the largest in the world, and one of Jacob Epstein’s last and finest sculptures. Yet this indubitable gem of 20th Century Christianity could not have existed without the destruction of the magnificent medieval St Michael’s.

The modern Coventry Cathedral alongside the ruins of the original, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch
The modern Coventry Cathedral alongside the ruins of the original, 2 August 2018. © Gerry Lynch

Resurrection follows death. Resurrection is not possible without death. Yet that does not make the death any less real, or any less painful, nor does it make the loss of physical presence that death entails any less final or less disturbing. That is the central paradox of the Christian faith. It is, in every sense of the word, disturbing.

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The Mosque of Bohoniki

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The Mosque of Bohoniki, South West ElevationThe mosque at Bohoniki is one of the last places of worship of the Lipka Tatar community which still survives as it has since the late 14th Century in what are now the borderlands Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus.

The mosque was built at the turn of the 19th and the 20th centuries, probably in 1873 to replace an earlier mosque destroyed in a fire. During World War II, the mosque was destroyed by the Nazis, who organised a field hospital on the site. After 1945, the mosque underwent several renovations several times. In 2003, the roof was renovated; the tin roof was changed to shingle roof. In 2005 a general renovation was carried out.

It is a simple wooden building built on a rectangular plan with dimensions of 11.49 m × 8.03 m. It has been restored with the help of the Polish and Turkish governments and the European Union.

Bohoniki Mosque - Minbar

This is the minbar, a pulpit in any mosque, where the imam stands to deliver sermons, as well as delivering a wider range of readings and prayers.

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Holy Cross Church, Vilnius

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The history of the little church of Holy Cross, Vilnius, dates back to 1543, when a chapel was built on the site to commemorate the martyrdom of a group of Franscians in the 14th Century. In the 16th century, a Gothic chapel of the Holy Cross was built here by the Bishop of Vilnius Povilas … Read more

The Sad State of North Belfast’s Riverside…

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Crossposted at Slugger O’Toole…

The Harbour Commissioners with Sinclair Seamen's Church in the background - two of Sailortown's little visited gems.
The Harbour Commissioners with Sinclair Seamen’s Church in the background – two of Sailortown’s little visited gems.

A bright, cold, day earlier this week saw me head out for a constitutional along what is now rather a pleasant route along the banks of the Lagan past the Odyssey and up to the Titanic Museum. With the hazy afternoon sun making the East Belfast bank of the river look particularly pretty, and the tourist information signs informing me of the Belfast Maritime Trail, I changed my mind and instead turned left at the Lagan Weir and decided to walk to Sailortown and then on for home.

By chance, the next day I had the opportunity to do the same walk a second time in cloudier and colder conditions, when an American academic friend who has visited Belfast regularly for some years told me he had never been in the New Lodge or Tiger’s Bay. A perfect opportunity for a bit of maritime heritage trailing plus an introduction to North Belfast.

My friend lives in Detroit. The urban DMZ feel at Donegall Quay made him feel right at home.
My friend lives in Detroit. The urban DMZ look at Donegall Quay made him feel right at home.

If one is a maritime history buff or a fan of 19th Century architecture, there is enough of interest to make the walk worthwile, but sadly right-of-access issues mean the walking route regularly departs from the river and at times is downright ugly. As I said, there is enough that it still might appeal to tourists with a particular interest in Victorian North British architecture or maritime history, or locals interested in a part of Belfast that was key to its development as a major industrial port, but this walk must be staggeringly off-putting to any run of the mill tourist.

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