Saint Basil's Cathedral

Ivan IV ordered the church that became Saint Basil's Cathedral built on Red Square to commemorate two military victories, the capture of the Khanates of Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan shortly after, campaigns that extended Muscovite control deep into formerly independent Tatar territory. Construction ran from 1555 to 1561, and what resulted was not a single church in the ordinary sense but a cluster of nine separate chapels, each dedicated to a saint or feast tied to the campaign, arranged around a tall central church and unified externally by a skyline of onion domes, no two decorated quite alike.

The building's formal name, the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat, refers to the moat that once ran along the Kremlin wall and to the feast on which Kazan fell. Almost nobody uses that name in practice. The cathedral is known instead for Vasily the Blessed, a Muscovite holy fool revered for feigned madness adopted as ascetic humility, buried at the site with his relics later enshrined in an added chapel.

The cathedral survived threats that removed many of Moscow's other historic buildings. Napoleon's retreating army reportedly considered destroying it in 1812, and Soviet authorities are said to have discussed demolishing it in the 1930s. It was secularized into a state museum after the Russian Revolution, with occasional Orthodox services permitted rather than resumed as a working parish church.

Saint Basil's forms part of the Kremlin and Red Square, inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1990, and its silhouette has become one of the most widely reproduced images of any religious building anywhere, an outcome its builders could hardly have anticipated for what was, in its own century, simply a victory church.

The two names most associated with Saint Basil's Cathedral, Barma and Postnik, may not belong to two separate people at all. Documentary evidence for the building's construction between 1555 and 1561 is thin enough that some architectural historians now argue Barma and Postnik Yakovlev were one man known by two names, rather than a pair of master builders working together, though the traditional two builder account is still the more commonly repeated version.

What the surviving evidence rules out more confidently is the story attached to whichever of them actually built it. Popular legend holds that Ivan the Terrible had the architect blinded once the cathedral was complete, so that he could never design anything to equal it again. Historians treat the story as invention: the same architect is documented working afterward on the Cathedral of the Annunciation in Kazan and on the walls and towers of the Kazan Kremlin, the same commission a blinded man could not have carried out.

The building's most famous feature was also not part of the original design. Written descriptions and a surviving seventeenth century engraving suggest the cathedral's domes were originally simpler and closer to uniform in shape than the swirling, brightly patterned onion domes visible today; historians broadly agree the vivid painted colors and patterns were a later addition, applied well after Ivan's reign, and the underlying helmet shaped domes themselves have been rebuilt more than once following fires. What survives, in other words, is not quite what was built, and not quite what legend says was built either, a cathedral whose most repeated stories about its own construction turn out to be the least reliable part of its history.