Byzantine Revival Architecture

Byzantine Revival, also called Neo-Byzantine, is a revival movement most frequently seen in religious, institutional and public buildings, which emerged in Western Europe in the 1840s and peaked in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, continuing into the early twentieth. It drew on Byzantine architectural elements of the fifth through eleventh centuries, commonly adopting the Greek cross plan for church designs, decorative mosaics rather than carved stone, and elongated domes with richly ornamented interiors modeled on historical precedent. The style found particular prominence in the Russian Empire, Bulgaria and Serbia, where architects including David Grimm and Vasily Kosyakov developed a national type of single-dome Byzantine cathedral with four symmetrical pendentive apses that became standard during the 1880s and 1890s. Notable examples include the Sacre-Coeur Basilica in Paris, built from 1875 to 1914, Westminster Cathedral in London, built from 1895 to 1903, the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, built from 1882 to 1912, and the Church of Saint Sava in Belgrade.