Saint Basil's Cathedral

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Saint Basil’s Cathedral — formally the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Mother of God on the Moat — is the Orthodox church on the southern edge of Red Square in Moscow, built between 1555 and 1561 by order of Ivan IV, “the Terrible.” Its silhouette of bright, twisting onion domes is among the most recognizable in the world, though that polychrome was added over later centuries; the original is thought to have been white and gold.

The church was raised as a votive monument. Ivan had taken the Tatar khanate of Kazan in 1552, and the cathedral commemorates that campaign — several of its chapels are dedicated to the saints whose feast days fell on the days of decisive battles. The popular name comes later, from Basil the Blessed (Vasily), a sixteenth-century holy fool venerated in Moscow and buried on the site; a chapel built over his grave gave the whole structure the name by which it is now known. The fool-for-Christ, who feigned madness and rebuked the powerful, was a recognized figure of Russian Orthodox sanctity, and the tradition holds that Ivan himself feared him.

Architecturally the building is a single composition of nine churches on one foundation: a tall, tent-roofed central chapel ringed by eight smaller ones, their plan describing an eight-pointed star. The arrangement has long invited symbolic reading. In Orthodox interpretation the eight-pointed star carries associations with the age to come, the eighth day beyond the seven of creation; and the whole — a clustered, walled, many-towered city of churches — has been understood as an image of the heavenly Jerusalem brought to earth, the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation. How far such meanings were intended by the builders, and how far they are later interpretation, is not settled; the sixteenth-century record is sparse, and the legend that Ivan blinded the architects so they could never repeat the work is almost certainly untrue.

The cathedral stood through the city’s later history with its function altered more than once. Under Soviet rule it was secularized and turned into a museum, and survived proposals for its demolition. It remains a museum today, with occasional Orthodox services held within it, and is inscribed, with the wider Kremlin and Red Square ensemble, on the UNESCO World Heritage list. What was built as a thanksgiving for a conquest became, over four centuries, the emblem of the city that raised it.

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