Religion

Macabre symbols of death and mummies on display set the tone of this Italian purgatory church.

One of the last surviving ancient Buddhist sites in the region, it escaped the brunt of several Hun invasions thanks to its remote location.

Hidden treasures belonging to Mongolia's most revered and multi-talented monk spent decades buried in the Gobi desert.

Ohio's 19th-century communist micro-society.

Centuries before the modern seismograph, Armenian monks measured quakes with this tilting pillar.

A model of a galactic embassy is hidden in plain sight along the highway, proposed by a UFO religion to find the aliens that created life on Earth.

An enigmatic natural rock formation with a manmade passage cut through the center.

Thousands of abandoned statues of deities are taken to this hillside in southern Hong Kong.

A hardware store Buddha statue installed to deter vandalism wound up attracting Vietnamese immigrants who came to pray.

Baptisms in troughs and post-sermon rodeos at the world's biggest cowboy church.

This tiny, charming synagogue in the Cayman Islands was built by a man as a present for his Jewish wife.

This old mill and former police station now present a world-class collection of Orthodox iconography.

America's oldest Eastern European synagogue provided the immigrants of crowded Lower East Side tenements a space of sanctuary.