Abstract
This chapter looks at five national cathedrals built after 1991 in postsocialist Europe, comparing cases from Moscow (Christ the Saviour and Russian Armed Forces cathedrals), Bucharest (People's Salvation Cathedral), Tbilisi (Holy Trinity Cathedral) and Warsaw (Temple of Divine Providence). However, since the construction of the Bucharest cathedral is the project most familiar to myself (Tateo 2020), its features will be described more extensively.
The adjective 'national' denotes the civil significance these major works are invested with, as they belong to the church of the majority in each country. For this reason, I will not include other important projects like the two Greek-Catholic cathedrals built in Kiev and Cluj-Napoca, or the Orthodox one erected in Tirana.
Likewise, other major works like Belgrade's St. Sava Cathedral will not be considered.
This last impressive example has a trajectory similar to the other case studies here discussed: a major historical event as a trigger, the oppression suffered by a foreign threat and abundant civil and national symbolism (Aleksov 2003). However, construction work officially started in 1935 and advanced during the late socialist period; only its consecration happened after socialism.
I shall proceed by presenting each case according to their historical trajectory, funding, location and civil significance. Thepurpose of this chapter is not to give an all-round 'appraisal' of each cathedral - local perceptions will not be discussed due to a patent lack of space - but rather to show common trajectories in the realisation of such major works.
Even though each religious complex has its own peculiarities, there are a few commonalities that make church-building a valuable vantage point to study postsocialist change. Firstly, what ties together these five imposing religious buildings is the implementation of an eminently nationalist blueprint.
After the demise of state socialism, political actors eager to capitalise on the resurgence of nationalist sentiments met the ambitions of Orthodox (or Catholic in Poland) church leaders anxious to restate the prominence of majority churches in a religious market on the way to pluralisation. In all cases, the stress on civil symbolism coincides with the subordination of religious signifiers, and in most of them, also with the adoption of the anticommunist hegemonic discourse.
It is in this way that such grandiose church-building activities - rather than a grassroots-driven religious revival - disguise nation-building strategies often pursued through state financing and the rewriting of history. The arguments in this chapter are based on Benedict Anderson's definition of nationalism as a narrative of 'turning chance into destiny' (Anderson 1983: 12) and I will argue that this is exactly the mechanism behind most of the cathedrals here discussed.
When analysing this transition from contingency to fate, Anderson talks of a certain magic, as if it were a sort of trickery. Inspired by Anderson, Michael Taussig also refers to magic but in relation with the state, that is, the 'abstract entity we credit with Being' (Taussig 1997: 3) that preaches the cult of the nation.
Taussig links the machinery of state self-legitimisation with the harnessing of death forces, symbols and rituals. The treatment of dead bodies can entail political consequences at any societal scale - from local (Geertz 1957) to transnational (Verdery 1999: 2-3) - but I will focus on their usage as markers of national identity and belonging: among the most important tasks that newly built national cathedrals aim to take on are dead commemoration rites and funerals of prominent personalities (and the conservation of their bodies in pantheons, crypts and mausoleums).