By 1997, Moscow’s skyline was transformed when a vast golden dome, long absent, rose once again over the city. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour had returned. The dome-topped structure now standing along the Moskva River is a near-exact replica of the original 19th-century cathedral built to commemorate Russia’s victory over Napoleon in 1812. The cathedral was destroyed by the Bolsheviks in 1931, then in 1958 it was replaced with a massive outdoor swimming pool, reusing the abandoned foundation of the Palace of the Soviets. My mother swam in this pool as a child in the early 1980s, basking in its steaming waters while snow fell around her and passersby. The absence of the cathedral above her was a testament to the Soviet state’s ‘ideological triumph’ over the past. Decades later, however, the pool was drained, the land consecrated once more, and the cathedral rebuilt, signalling changing times and ideologies. Today, walking past the cathedral, you’d be hard-pressed to find any mention of its former life as a swimming pool. Yet, as the Russian proverb goes, cвято место пусто не бывает – a sacred space is never empty.

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in the early 20th century, before demolition. Courtesy Wikimedia

So, is it the same cathedral? If not, what is it? And why does it matter?

The story of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is not unique. Across the world and throughout time, structures have been deliberately erased and later resurrected as replicas – often as a nod to new (or resurgent) political and ideological undercurrents. For example, Dresden’s Frauenkirche, obliterated in the firebombing of the Second World War, stood in ruins for half a century before being meticulously reconstructed. St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv was demolished by Soviet authorities in the 1930s but then rebuilt in the 1990s as an assertion of Ukrainian identity. Stari Most, the old bridge over the Neretva River in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was destroyed during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s and rebuilt using stones from the original 16th-century Ottoman bridge as a symbol of multi-ethnic unity.

But at some point, the replica becomes the ‘original’. Take the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The fairgrounds were filled with architectural reproductions, including, as Amanda Reeser Lawrence writes in her book The Architecture of Influence: The Myth of Originality in the Twentieth Century (2023), ‘a full-scale replica of the convent where Christopher Columbus stayed before his first voyage to the New World’, along with mock streets from Cairo and Constantinople and national pavilions that presented curated versions of global cultures. These recreations deployed architectural fantasy and voyeurism in the service of ideologies that promoted only European cultures as ‘highbrow’, with everyone else as barbarian or backward. For American audiences who had never experienced the ‘original’ by visiting the countries represented, these pavilions became their primary frame of reference. In this sense, the replica was not just a stand-in or ‘official’ representation of a culture, but a definitive version that reinforced an exoticised perspective.

Reproductions, replicas and copies are not a modern phenomenon. Rather, the modern era has allowed for the production of replicas to accelerate in both their exactitude and the speed at which they’re built; it took 44 years to build the first Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, but only five to rebuild it. Architectural replicas raise fascinating questions about history, authenticity and national identity. Does rebuilding a monument succeed in reclaiming a lost heritage, or does it overwrite history to suit modern narratives? Or perhaps the act of rebuilding does a bit of both, because an artefact that claims continuity with the past but is a product of the present is not simply a replica; at some point, it just becomes real.

The tension inherent in how we understand architectural replicas can be tightened up by looking at two opposing schools of thought in preservation: ‘scrape’ and ‘anti-scrape’. These terms emerged in the late 19th century, coined by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in Britain – but they neatly encapsulate the philosophies of two influential figures, Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and John Ruskin.

Viollet-le-Duc was a French architect who advocated for a ‘scrape’ method of restoration, and whose restoration projects mostly included medieval French landmarks, including Notre-Dame de Paris. He believed that restoration meant more than repair, that it was a creative act, a process of projecting backwards in time to complete a building as its original architect would have intended it. ‘To restore a building,’ he wrote, ‘is not to preserve it, to repair it, or to rebuild it; it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness that may never have existed at any given time.’ For him, architecture was a living system that could be improved through invention, as long as the restorer could experience the spirit of the original design. In this sense, restoration was........

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