Saint Basil's Cathedral

A soldier in Napoleon's retreating army is told to light a fuse. It is October 1812, Moscow is already half ash, and the order has come down that the strange striped church at the edge of Red Square should not be left standing. The story says the rain did the rest. The fuses spluttered out, the army moved on, and the building stayed. Nobody can prove that version of events, but it fits the building: this cathedral has a habit of almost being destroyed and then simply still being there.

Built For A Victory

The building exists because of a siege that happened hundreds of kilometres away. In the autumn of 1552, the young Tsar Ivan IV took Kazan, the capital of a Tatar khanate on the Volga. It was Moscow's first decisive push eastward, and Ivan wanted a monument that could not be mistaken for anything else. Construction ran from 1555 to 1561. The official name was, and technically still is, the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat, because the final assault on Kazan happened on the feast of the Intercession, and the church went up beside the defensive ditch that then ran along the Kremlin wall.

What the builders made was not one church but a cluster. A tall tent-roofed tower sits in the middle, and around it stand eight smaller churches, each with its own dome, its own entrance, its own dedication tied to a day of the Kazan campaign. They share one raised stone platform and are joined by narrow galleries. From the outside it reads as a single fantastical object. From the inside it is a maze of small, dim rooms and tight passages. The chronicles name the masters as Barma and Postnik; some historians think those were two names for one man. Either way, nobody in Russia had attempted a composition like this before.

The Blinding That Probably Never Happened

The most repeated story about the cathedral is that Ivan, delighted with the result, had the architect blinded so he could never build anything to rival it. It is a satisfying tale and almost certainly false. Records place a master named Postnik Yakovlev working on the stone kremlin in Kazan a few years later, which is hard to do without eyes. The legend seems to have grown much later, once Ivan's reputation as "the Terrible" had hardened and people needed a story big enough to explain a building this odd.

The name everyone actually uses comes from a different character entirely. Basil, or Vasily, was a "holy fool" who walked Moscow barefoot and mostly naked in every season, knocked over merchants' stalls he considered dishonest, and reportedly scolded the Tsar to his face. Muscovites adored him, and Ivan apparently did not dare touch him. When Basil died he was buried beside the cathedral, and in 1588 a tenth chapel was added over his grave. That small side chapel gradually lent its name to the whole complex. A monument to a conquest ended up carrying the name of a man who mocked power for a living.

The Colours Came Later

The swirling reds, greens, blues and golds that define the building today were not there in the sixteenth century. The original cathedral was far plainer: red brick, white stone trim, and domes that were probably plain metal. The painted, twisted, pineapple-textured onion domes were added over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in layers, after a series of fires and repairs. The look that made the cathedral famous is something its founder never saw. The building took about two hundred years to become itself.

Surviving The Twentieth Century

The Soviet period was more dangerous than Napoleon. The cathedral was closed as a place of worship in the late 1920s and turned into a museum. In the decades that followed, plans to widen Red Square for military parades repeatedly raised the question of removing the building that "blocked" the square's southern end. One often-told story has Stalin looking at a model from which the cathedral had been lifted out and saying, simply, "Put it back." Another credits the restorer Pyotr Baranovsky with risking his freedom to protect it. The documentation behind both stories is thin. The outcome is not: the parades went on for decades, turning awkwardly around the cathedral, and the cathedral stayed exactly where it was.

Today

Saint Basil's is now a branch of the State Historical Museum. Services resumed in the late 1990s, so on some days the museum route and a liturgy share the same corridors. In 1990 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list together with the Kremlin and Red Square.

The threat these days is not an army or a planning committee. It is Moscow weather and the age of the brick. Four and a half centuries of freeze and thaw work at the lime mortar, plaster cracks and the dome paint has to be renewed every few years. The building has never really been finished; it has been under repair, in one form or another, for most of its existence. Stand inside one of the small chapels and you realise how little space the famous silhouette actually contains. Nine churches, still separate, still sharing one floor.