The gilded domes
Onion domes glinting above a grey stone quarter.
Credits to Mourad Ben Abdallah / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Björn S. — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Björn S. — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Björn S. — CC BY-SA 3.0
Not a destination in itself, but an **excellent free addition** if you are in the area. Slot it in between the old town and the Museum of Art and History: ten minutes downhill on foot from the cathedral, a quarter of an hour inside, nothing to pay. And if you find it closed — quite possible given the short hours — the façade and domes from the street give you most of the visual value anyway.
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Its formal name is the **Cathedral of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross**, a Russian Orthodox church standing in the quiet Tranchées quarter just east of the old town. Its foundation stone was laid in September 1863 to designs by **David Grimm**, professor of architecture at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. It was built from donations gathered across Russia and among Russians abroad, and consecrated on **26 September 1866**. Its visual surprise is that it resembles nothing else in Geneva: **gilded onion domes** glinting above a street of austere grey Protestant stone, striped Byzantine arches, and the nineteenth-century Russian Revival manner drawing on Moscow churches of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and on Byzantine art. Inside: walls and vaults covered in Byzantine-style painting, and an iconostasis of five arcades in **Carrara marble**. The visit is short — a quarter of an hour is enough — and free, but the **opening hours are narrow and variable**, and you may well find it shut. This is a working church, not a monument: keep quiet, dress modestly, and do not photograph during services. Its position is excellent in any case: five minutes on foot from the Museum of Art and History and ten from the cathedral, so it works as a natural stop between the two rather than a destination on its own.
Onion domes glinting above a grey stone quarter.
Five arcades of Carrara marble inside.
Walls and vaults covered entirely with church imagery.
Rue Rodolphe-Toepffer 9, 1206 Geneva