York Minster

York Minster is the colloquial name of the cathedral and metropolitan church. St. Peter in York. It is the second largest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe (after the Cologne cathedral). It has the shape of a cross with an octagonal chapter house attached to the North Transept, as well as three towers. The building is 160 meters long and the tallest central tower is 72 meters high. The cathedral has the widest Gothic nave in England.

The first church in this place was a wooden temple built in 627 on the occasion of the baptism of Edwin, King of Northumbria. A decade later it was replaced by a stone church. The construction of the current cathedral began around 1230 and lasted nearly 250 years. Several times the temple was destroyed by fires, the most serious of which took place in 1829. It was the result of arson by the mentally unstable Jonathan Martin, later detained in a psychiatric hospital.