Durham Cathedral, formally the Cathedral Church of Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin and St Cuthbert of Durham, is a Church of England cathedral in the city of Durham, England. The cathedral is the seat of the bishop of Durham and is the mother church of the diocese of Durham. It also contains the shrines of the Anglo-Saxon saints Cuthbert and Bede. There are daily Church of England services at the cathedral, and it received 393,090 visitors in 2014. It is a grade I listed building and forms part of the Durham Castle and Cathedral World Heritage Site.

The cathedral is the successor to the Anglo-Saxon Lindisfarne Priory, which was established c. 635 but abandoned in 875 in the face of Viking raids. The monks settled at Chester-le-Street from 882 until 995, when they moved to Durham. The cathedral remained a monastery until it was dissolved in 1541, since when it has been governed by a dean and chapter. The cathedral precinct formed part of Durham Castle from the eleventh century. During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms the cathedral housed 3,000 Scottish prisoners of war, 1,700 of whom died in the building.

The present building was substantially completed between 1093 and 1133, replacing the Anglo-Saxon "White Church". It is a significant example of the Romanesque architectural style, and the nave ceiling is the earliest surviving example of a pointed rib vault. The Galilee chapel was added to the west end of the cathedral in the 1170s, and the western towers built in approximately 1200. The east end was expanded in the Early English Gothic style in the 1230s, and the Perpendicular Gothic central tower was built in two stages in the fifteenth century. Important furnishings include the medieval bishop's throne and Neville screen, Prior Castell's Clock, and the seventeenth-century choir stalls and font cover installed by Bishop Cosin. Many of the monastic buildings survive; the monks' refectory now contains part of the cathedral library, which holds significant collections dating back to the sixth century.

The See of Durham takes its origins from the Diocese of Lindisfarne, founded by Saint Aidan at the behest of Oswald of Northumbria in about 635, which was translated to York in 664. The see was reinstated at Lindisfarne in 678 by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Among the many saints who originated at Lindisfarne Priory, the greatest was Saint Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne from 685 until his death in 687, who is central to the development of Durham Cathedral.

After repeated Viking raids, the monks fled from Lindisfarne in 875, carrying Saint Cuthbert's relics with them. The diocese of Lindisfarne remained itinerant until 882, when the monks resettled at Chester-le-Street, 60 miles south of Lindisfarne and 6 miles north of Durham. The see remained at Chester-le-Street until 995, when further Viking incursions once again caused the monks to move with their relics. According to the local legend of the Dun Cow and the saint's hagiography, the monks followed two milk maids who were searching for a dun-coloured cow and found themselves on a peninsula formed by a loop in the River Wear. Thereupon, Cuthbert's coffin became immovable, which was taken as a sign that the new shrine should be built on that spot, which became the City of Durham. A more prosaic set of reasons for the selection of the peninsula is its highly defensible position, and that a community established there would enjoy the protection of the Earl of Northumbria, with whom the bishop at this time, Aldhun, had strong family connections. Today the street leading from The Bailey past the cathedral's eastern towers up to Palace Green is named Dun Cow Lane due to the miniature dun cows which used to graze in the pastures nearby.

Initially, a very simple temporary structure was built from local timber to house the relics of Saint Cuthbert. The shrine was then transferred to a sturdier, probably still wooden, building known as the White Church. This church was itself replaced three years later in 998 by a stone building also known as the White Church, which in 1018 was complete except for its tower. Durham soon became a site of pilgrimage, encouraged by the growing cult of Saint Cuthbert. King Canute was one of the early pilgrims, and granted many privileges and estates to the Durham monks. The defensible position, flow of money from pilgrims and power embodied in the church at Durham all encouraged the formation of a town around the cathedral, which established the core of the city.

The present cathedral was designed and built under William de St-Calais (also known as William of St. Carilef). In 1083 he founded the Benedictine Priory of St. Cuthbert at Durham and having ejected the secular canons (and their wives and children) who had been in charge of the church and shrine of St Cuthbert there, replaced them with monks from the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. The extensive lands of the church he divided between his own bishopric and the new Priory. He appointed Aldwin as the first prior.

Bishop William of St. Calais demolished the old Saxon church, and on 11 August 1093, together with Prior Turgot of Durham (Aldwin's successor), he laid the foundation stone of the great new cathedral. The monks continued at their own expense to build the monastic buildings while the bishop took the responsibility for completing the building of the cathedral. Stone for the new buildings was cut from the cliffs below the walls and moved up using winches. The primary reason for the cathedral was to house the bodies of St. Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede.