St. Basil's Cathedral

Interesting facts

During restoration in 1954–1955, workers found a wooden frame hidden inside the brick walls, built as a full-size model of the church and then encased in masonry.

The central Church of the Intercession rises about 46 metres inside, yet its floor area is only about 64 square metres.

The famous colours are not original: they were added in stages between the 1680s and 1848, while the 16th-century church was red brick and white with gilded domes.

French troops occupying Moscow in 1812 used the church as a stable, and an order to blow it up as they left was never carried out.

In 1933 the church was struck off the heritage register, and the restorer Pyotr Baranovsky was arrested after objecting to plans to demolish it.

A story often told says that when Kaganovich lifted a model of the church off a plan of Red Square, Stalin told him to put it back.

The geometric centre of Moscow's Garden Ring lies not in the Kremlin but at the cathedral.

Its builders used no sculpture or sacred symbols on the exterior, decorating it instead entirely with three-dimensional brickwork, then a new material in Moscow.

On Palm Sunday the church stood in for the Temple of Jerusalem in a procession attended by both the patriarch and the tsar, a ritual last held in 1693.

The central church is deliberately set off-centre to the west, so the facade facing the Kremlin looks symmetrical while the other sides appear irregular.

Why it is worth it

St. Basil's Cathedral was built between 1555 and 1561 on Ivan the Terrible's orders to commemorate the Russian capture of the Tatar stronghold of Kazan in 1552 — which is why it isn't dedicated to Basil at all in its official name, the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin on the Moat. Each of its original chapels commemorates a saint's day tied to a battle in that campaign.

The popular name came later, from someone else entirely. Basil, a Moscow holy fool known for public fasting and blunt public criticism of the tsar, was buried near the site, and a chapel added over his grave in 1588 eventually gave its name to the whole building.

The most famous story about its construction — that Ivan the Terrible had the architect blinded so he could never build anything as beautiful again — doesn't hold up. The man usually credited as architect, Postnik Yakovlev, is documented working on other major commissions well into the 1560s, including the Kazan Kremlin's own walls. The blinding story appears to be a mix-up with an unrelated legend about Ivan the Terrible's grandfather, Ivan III, blinding the architect of a fortress decades earlier — a tale that migrated onto the more famous building over time.

Good to know

Official name: Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin on the Moat. "St. Basil's" is a popular name added after 1588.
Nine original chapels, each tied to a saint's day from the 1552 Kazan campaign.

Getting there

Located in Moscow. Sheremetyevo International Airport (SVO) is about 28 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

The Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed, commonly known as Saint Basil's Cathedral, is a Russian Orthodox church on Red Square in the historic centre of Moscow. It is one of the most popular cultural symbols of Russia. The building, now a museum, is officially known as the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat, or Pokrovsky Cathedral. It was built from 1555 to 1561 on orders from Ivan the Terrible and commemorates the capture of Kazan and Astrakhan. It was completed, with its colours, in 1683.

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