Frederik's Church (the Marble Church)

The dome above you is the largest in Scandinavia, thirty-one metres across. It is also the end point of the most embarrassing building project in Danish history. Frederik V laid the foundation stone on the thirty-first of October 1749. The architect Nicolai Eigtved had drawn a church in Norwegian marble, on a scale meant to stand comparison with St Peter's in Rome. That was how the king wanted Denmark to look. Then Eigtved died. The marble from Norway turned out to cost far more than anyone had reckoned with. And in 1770 Struensee cut the funding entirely. Work stopped. And there it stood. Not for a few years, but for almost a hundred and fifty. A half-finished, open ruin in the middle of the city's finest new district, right beside where the royal family would soon be living. People took stone from it for their own houses. Painters came to sketch it, because in the nineteenth century a ruin was the most romantic subject there was. For a few generations the church was far more famous as a ruin than it ever became as a church. It took a businessman to sort it out. C.F. Tietgen bought the site in 1874 and paid to have it finished, now in Danish limestone instead of marble. The church was consecrated on the nineteenth of August 1894, a hundred and forty-five years after the foundation stone was laid.