Eglise Orthodoxe Alexandre Newsky

There's a Russian Orthodox church on the same street as the empress's palace, and that's not a coincidence. In the late nineteenth century, Biarritz was essentially the summer playground for Russian aristocracy. The tsars and their court came here in droves. Empress Maria Feodorovna, wife of Tsar Alexander the Third, was a regular visitor. When you have that many Russian nobles in one resort town, eventually someone builds a church.

This one was built in eighteen ninety-two specifically by and for Russian aristocrats. It was consecrated on September the twenty-fifth of that year in the presence of members of the Russian imperial family. The architecture is distinctly Russian Orthodox, with the characteristic onion dome that looks utterly out of place against the Basque Country skyline. That visual contrast is part of what makes it so striking. You're walking along an avenue of Belle Epoque villas and suddenly there's a piece of Saint Petersburg.

Now here's a detail that connects tsarist Russia to the Cold War. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author and Soviet dissident who spent years in the gulags, donated money to the church's nineteen eighty-four restoration. Solzhenitsyn, the man who exposed the horror of Soviet labour camps in The Gulag Archipelago, helping restore a church built by the very aristocracy the Soviets overthrew. The ironies pile up.

The church was classified as a Historic Monument in two thousand and fifteen. It's small and easy to miss if you're not paying attention, but it represents something fascinating about Biarritz's history. This town wasn't just French and Basque. For decades, it was one of the most cosmopolitan places in Europe. Russian, British, Spanish, and French aristocrats all claimed a piece of it.