"graveyard of grand and beautiful buildings"

A REPORTER VISITS the ruined Cathedral of Mogadishu, Somalia; see the article Somalia's graveyard of grand and beautiful buildings, on the BBC website. From the article:

"...we were inside the remains of what had once been one of the grandest Catholic cathedrals in the whole of Africa, built by Italian colonialists in the 1920s. Its last bishop, Salvatore Colombo, was murdered there in 1989 as he was giving mass.

"I felt very tiny inside that building. Perhaps because the roof has been completely blown off, the walls of the cathedral seemed to stretch right up to the blue sky above.

"Although we were in the carcass of a building, enough remained of the elegant stone arches and the shadows of crosses, for us to know that we were in a sacred place..."

Mogadishu was devastated by civil war, but the city is now being rebuilt.