The Iron Cathedral. Episode 1: Path to the Abyss.
When the journey is more important than the recording.
- Location: “Peak of Sorrow.” High-mountain pass [COORDINATES REDACTED]. Object 9.13-1-111.
- Era: 12th Century / Re-envisioned: 21st Century.
I write these lines with a sense of reverence and a tremor that I still cannot suppress when remembering this story. Looking back, I realize: our journey in search of sound, our venture to record the album “in the mountains, ” could have ended not with a release, but with an obituary. Or worse, with madness—the kind that comes when sound ceases to obey man. We stepped onto the border of a world where there is no place for the living.
I did not come here for adrenaline, but for that which is capable of changing our sound. Only later did I understand that sometimes the path to sound is a path through one’s own fear.
When starting the story of where we recorded the music for the KriegesPhantom album, I paused. Even the word “premises” applies to this place only with a great stretch of the imagination. Geography chose our studio for us.
And although the approaches to the destination were closed by the military department, no one had any idea what kind of “object” the mountain range was hiding. Meanwhile, the transit permit arranged by Jürgen and the escort with special transport opened all paths for us. His connections with the military and his ability to overcome any barriers and penetrate closed facilities had become so habitual to me that I stopped questioning how he managed it.
Judging by the documents he unearthed while searching for extreme adventures: somewhere high in the mountains lay an old bunker with unique acoustics. During the Cold War, it served as a kind of echo sounder for calculating missile launches from anywhere in the world. Later, it was used by the meteorological service to monitor seismic activity and forecast earthquakes and eruptions.
Acoustics were the only thing of paramount importance to us, so we set out without hesitation. The route there led not so much upward as backward in time—through empty villages, mists, and small graveyards of the Crusader era.
The place we chose was marked on the archival map as an abandoned weather station in a restricted zone. But the map contained an error. Hidden among the rusty iron of the 20th century was the frame of a medieval Citadel. Local legends say that in the 12th century, a garrison of an Order stood here, whose name was erased from the Vatican chronicles.
But let’s take it in order.
The Forbidden Zone.
To the north of the tourist trails, the mountains change their face. Here, the relief loses its picturesque outlines and takes on a threatening image. The ridges rise to the sky in sharp, broken peaks resembling the teeth of a dragon baring its fangs.
The clouds here do not float—they lie. Leaden masses cling to the stone as if the sky is tired of holding its own weight and is trying to lean on the ground. In these gorges, where the sun penetrates only for a brief moment, eternal twilight reigns. The air here is thick, dry, and has a strange metallic taste—as if the atmosphere itself had passed through the forge of unknown eras.
The road we advanced along was a seam on the body of the mountain. An old military track, paved with stone back when artillery was transported by oxen, wound along the cliffs. The track coiled over the abyss with a frightening geometric inevitability, bypassing rocks where stunted, twisted firs miraculously held on. Their trunks were bent by the winds into poses resembling agony. It seemed these trees were trying to hold onto the cliffs to avoid being torn into the abyss.
The locals in the valley remained silent, immediately crossing themselves and looking back at us with apprehension and pity as soon as we showed the map with our destination. In their eyes, one read not a warning, but fatalism. They knew: at this altitude, human presence is merely a temporary error.
The Threshold.
Finally reaching the site, we hit a blockage on a rocky plateau fenced with barbed wire. I examined the surroundings with interest. Heaps of stone and metal covered the plateau, and signs like “Danger Zone — Keep Out” and “Achtung! Militärische Sperrzone — Betreten verboten” clearly warned of peril.
The rusty frame of the weather station we were heading toward blocked our path and, against this backdrop, seemed like a ridiculous relic of modernity. Sheets of corrugated iron, eaten by corrosion, shook and groaned, trying to cover what was not meant for eyes.
It was a pathetic shell. For beneath the rotten concrete of the 20th century emerged a different masonry—massive, made of huge blocks of dark granite. The bones of an ancient world—the remains of a Teutonic Order watchtower, placed here eight hundred years ago to guard the pass not from men, but from what might come from the glaciers.
Massive blocks concealed an iron spiral staircase descending from the tower, leading, most likely, to the very “Bunker” we had heard about. It vanished downward almost unnoticed, as if the shaft itself had been designed to hide the way into the depths. The steps had been forged from black iron with raised edges, while the railing twisted in a heavy spiral. At each joint, the metal opened into distinctive Gothic patterns, shaped by a craftsman’s hand and softened by time. The beam of a flashlight slid along the iron and disappeared into the impenetrable mass of dark water below, making even the thought of a descent seem absurd.
This rock complex was clearly part of something larger. A ventilation shaft ahead marked the direction of the view that opened up.
Jürgen hardly looked at the ruins. His gaze was directed toward the clouds. He stood at the edge of the plateau and listened to the wind, as if trying to understand exactly how this altitude sounded.
The Temple of “Holy Steel” (Sanctum Ferrum).
My attention was caught by an abandoned Gothic cathedral standing at the very edge of the cliff at the end of the road, considerably battered by time but still well-preserved. Its black walls, built from blocks of roughly hewn basalt, seemed unnaturally dark even against the overcast sky. They absorbed light like a black hole. It looked as if the stone had not just been quarried, but scorched in some gigantic fire that occurred long before the appearance of humanity.
The scars of time had not destroyed it, but only exposed its essence. The wind had stripped away everything superficial, leaving only a naked, functional skeleton of war and faith. Narrow arrow slits, devoid of glass, looked at the valley with the arrogance of the blind.
It was a Fortress-Temple, built by people who knew a terrible secret hidden from the rest of the world. It seemed the walls of this bastion were meant to withstand not only siege engines but a direct strike from Hell itself.
I always draw during a journey, recording in sketches everything that leaves an impression, so that I can later return and refresh the memory. This engineer’s habit of taking notes arose from the belief: if you can transfer an object to paper, it means you have thought it through. Moreover, photography was prohibited here; my camera and phones were confiscated before the trip.
While the Mercedes-Benz G-Class (Wolf) army SUVs, equipped for cargo, cooled down after the climb, and the soldiers unloaded and set up camp (refusing to go further), I sat on the hood and moved the lead across the paper. The road ahead narrowed, and we would have to travel the remaining kilometer on foot with all the luggage. Fortunately, Hans, with his natural strength, replaced a freight locomotive, so that aspect didn’t worry me much. I was worried about the Cathedral!
The more I looked at the lines of the cathedral, the stronger a strange feeling grew—as if its form were subject not to geometry, but to some rhythm. The sketch does not convey the scale. The pencil slides, trying to find logic in these lines, but there is none. This temple was created by a mad architect in defiance of common sense. As if it weren’t built, but was an extension of the mountain, grown directly from it under colossal external pressure.
The drawing turned out ominous.
— “Looks like a headstone, ” Hans remarked, looking over my shoulder.
I am always ready for his jabs and wanted to object, but the pencil in my hand froze treacherously. He was right. A headstone. Only we didn’t know for whom yet.
An architectural paradox opened before us. The Romanesque style of the lower part contrasted with the Gothic above. Massive, squat walls grown into the rock were clearly created to hold a siege. And the spires, which should reach for God, were heavy, flattened, as if under the press of the sky itself. The pointed arches here did not strive upward as in the cathedrals of Cologne or Reims; rather, they resembled the ribs of a giant prehistoric beast that had lain down here to die and petrified. This was Gothic devoid of hope.
The temple was built to weigh the mountain down to the ground, as if what was hidden in its dungeons was trying to break out, and only the weight of these monumental structures kept it inside. Only the central spire extended upward, though its true height was invisible, as low-hanging clouds shrouded the entire highland, serving as a giant curtain separating this place from the rest of the world.
The Central Pillar.
The internal skeleton of the cathedral was made of the same gray granite as the frame of the watchtower, as was the floor, which in places retained a surface polished to a black mirror finish. Aside from a small heap of granite slabs at the entrance, the rest of the hall was in almost perfect condition.
These massive walls didn’t just hold the stone. They echoed as if they were listening to us just as we were listening to our own doubt.
At the center of the hall stood an enormous pillar rising into the dome, as though it alone held the entire structure aloft. Its width seemed excessive, and alongside the other columns it looked strangely out of place.
This central pillar felt far too massive to be a simple support. It resembled the core of some hidden mechanism—as if the dome and walls were merely parts of a machine whose purpose was known only to the builders of the Temple.
I walked around it.
Up close, it appeared even more alien. The other columns supported the vaults; this one felt like the heart of the entire structure—too massive, too precise to be an ordinary load-bearing pillar.
The Fresco.
The lesser columns lining the perimeter of the ancient structure still bore traces of faded frescoes, most likely depicting biblical scenes. Once magnificent, the paintings looked as though they had been struck by some invisible destructive force. The images had shattered into countless fragments. Scattered pieces of cracked plaster lay at the bases of the columns, revealing the strange nature of the damage. It did not resemble ordinary decay. It looked as though something powerful had erupted from within the stone itself, striking the columns from the inside out.
One of the surviving frescoes intensified the already heavy atmosphere. A large iconographic image of a winged creature, perhaps a demon, standing slightly leaning forward, as if holding something heavy and simultaneously fragile.
In its hands was a heart!
It was depicted with frightening anatomical precision—with veins, with the tensed form of muscle tissue, as if the artist worked not from imagination, but from observation. The figure’s wings were spread not in a gesture of protection, but rather balance—as if the creature were holding not so much a heart, but the weight of what it signified.
— “Poor unfed fellow. A bit of a scrawny little devil!” Hans remarked, looking at the protruding ribs and pointing out how the creature strained from a simple heart.
Compared to our “Monster, ” he indeed looked lean and wiry. However, Hans’s joke did not add optimism. Something in the image, as in the Cathedral itself, was ominous.
The fresco was surrounded by a ring of symbols carved directly into the stone. They did not resemble any alphabets known to me. Their lines were angular, almost mechanical in places, as if the master’s chisel repeated the shape of the teeth of some ancient tool. The symbols looked as if they repeated not a language, but a scheme—as if the stone were trying to remember the shape of sound.
I ran my fingers over one of the symbols. The stone was cold and rough. But the lines were surprisingly precise—too smooth for handwork. There was a rhythm in them, as if the symbols were arranged not by meaning, but by an acoustic principle—like notes located not on paper, but in the space of the pillar. For a moment, I remembered descriptions of the strange columns in Rosslyn Chapel—there, patterns were once also tied to music. Only here, everything looked much coarser. As if the master wasn’t decorating a temple, but tuning an instrument.
Beneath the relief was a small stone plaque bearing a short inscription in Greek:
The characters had survived remarkably well, as if protected by the very mass of the stone. None of us knew Greek, so the inscription remained undeciphered. I merely copied it into my notebook alongside the Cathedral’s other findings. At the time, it seemed like another fragment of a forgotten past — one of those mysteries that are set aside for later and eventually almost forgotten.
In general, the strangeness of the architecture raised questions. If the facade with arrow slits faced the road, the back side with giant windows hung over a kilometer-deep precipice with icy fog. This created a ghastly effect, a feeling that you are protected from the real world, but open to the Abyss. If not for the state of the windows, which were apparently reinforced by the alchemists of that time, the hall would have inspired terror.
Apparently, the Order did not fear a strike from this side. No living person could climb these cliffs, and a prayer, amplified by the walls themselves, perhaps protected from the “Other.” And for this, they had to see this threat.
The ancient builders understood that the outer shell of basalt would serve as armor, designed to hold the blow of the elements and artillery. The inner capsule of granite, however, was created for one purpose—to reflect and amplify Sound, preventing it from fading. We found ourselves inside a giant stone speaker, the cabinet of which was designed for eternity. It remained to understand exactly what kind of music it was meant to play.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)