Two Views Toward Heaven

Looking back on my summer of travel, I found these photos of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg.  Commissioned by Alexander I, the cathedral took 40 years to build, and produced a saying in Finnish: “Rakentaa kuin Iisakin kirkkoa,” “to build like Isaac’s Church,” meaning to take forever to complete some vast, ungainly, overdesigned project. Like St. Petersburg, the building of which cost the lives of tens of thousands of serfs, St. Isaac’s is build on the bodies of its workers: 60 alone...