Saint Basil's Cathedral

• 1. Introduction

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  Saint Basil's Cathedral stands at the southern end of Red Square in Moscow, and it looks like nothing else on earth. Russian historian Dmitry Shvidkovsky wrote that "nothing similar can be found in the entire millennium of Byzantine tradition from the fifth to the fifteenth century." He described a strangeness that astonishes by its unexpectedness, complexity, and dazzling interleaving of manifold details. That is a striking verdict from a scholar of Russian architecture. The building is not what it appears to be at first glance. It is not one cathedral but nine individual churches clustered on a single platform, each dome corresponding to a different sanctuary inside. It was built on the orders of Ivan the Terrible between 1555 and 1561 to mark his military victories over the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates. It was shaped, according to one description, like the flame of a bonfire rising into the sky. What drove Ivan to build it outside the Kremlin walls rather than inside them? Who actually designed it, and did the tsar really blind the architect afterward? How did the building survive Soviet demolition plans, French troops, and centuries of fire? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Ivan's Vision and the Unknown Builder

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  Tsar Ivan IV marked each victory of the Russo-Kazan War by erecting a wooden memorial church next to the walls of Trinity Church, the modest white-stone structure that already stood on the site. By the end of his Astrakhan campaign, Trinity Church was surrounded by a cluster of seven such wooden buildings. In the autumn of 1554, Nikon's Chronicle records, Ivan ordered a wooden Church of Intercession built "on the moat" at the same spot. A year later he commissioned a permanent stone cathedral in their place. Dedicating a church to a military victory was described as "a major innovation" for Muscovy at the time. The decision to place it outside the Kremlin walls was also deliberate. It was a political statement in favour of posad commoners and against hereditary boyars, a symbolic gesture by a tsar reaching the people directly, without clergy or aristocratic intermediaries.

  The identity of the architect has never been settled. Tradition named two builders: Barma and Postnik. Researchers later proposed that both names refer to a single person, Postnik Yakovlev, though an alternative candidate, Ivan Yakovlevich Barma, has also been put forward. The official Russian cultural heritage register lists both names as "Barma and Postnik Yakovlev." A famous legend held that Ivan blinded the architect after completion so he could never build something so magnificent for anyone else. Most historians consider that a myth. Postnik Yakovlev is documented as active at least through the 1560s and is known to have worked on the Cathedral of the Annunciation in Moscow and on the walls and towers of the Kazan Kremlin afterward. The legend likely grew from a separate account by Jerome Horsey, who described Ivan III of Moscow blinding the architect of the fortress of Ivangorod. There is firm evidence that construction involved stonemasons from Pskov and from German lands.

• 3. Architecture Without Precedent

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  Architects and historians have argued for well over a century about where the design of Trinity Church actually came from, and no consensus has emerged. The building combines the staggered layered form of the earliest part of the Ivan the Great Bell Tower, built between 1505 and 1508, the central tent structure of the Church of Ascension in Kolomenskoye from the 1530s, and the cylindrical shape of the Church of Beheading of John the Baptist in Dyakovo, dated to 1547. Yet the origins of those buildings are themselves disputed. Andrey Batalov revised the Dyakovo church's completion date from 1547 to the 1560s-70s and noted that Trinity Church may have had no tangible predecessors at all.

  Dmitry Shvidkovsky proposed that the unusual shapes of both Trinity Church and the Kolomenskoye church reflected an emerging national renaissance, blending Muscovite tradition with the influence of Italian Renaissance design. Italian architects and craftsmen worked continuously in Moscow from 1474 to 1539. Greek refugees who arrived after the fall of Constantinople added another strand. Shvidkovsky found resemblances between the cathedral's floor plan and concepts by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, Donato Bramante, and most likely Filarete's Trattato di architettura. Other Russian researchers noted similarities to sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, though there is no evidence that Leonardo's work was known in Ivan's Moscow.

  Andrey Batalov argued that the sheer number of novel elements in Trinity Church points to German craftsmen as the primary builders. German influence is supported by the rusticated pilasters of the central church, a feature more characteristic of contemporary Northern Europe than of Italy. The 1983 academic edition of Monuments of Architecture in Moscow settled on a middle position: the church most likely reflects a complex interaction of distinct Russian traditions in wooden and stone construction, with specific elements borrowed from Italian work in Moscow, including the style of brickwork in the vaults.

  Eugene Viollet-le-Duc rejected European roots entirely, arguing that the cathedral's corbel arches were Byzantine and ultimately Asian. A more recent hypothesis identifies the building as a symbolic recreation of the Qolsharif Mosque, which Russian troops destroyed after the Siege of Kazan. The foundations were built of white stone, following medieval Muscovite tradition, while the churches above were raised in red brick measuring 28 by 14 by 8 centimetres, then a relatively new material in Moscow. The first attested brick building in the city, the new Kremlin Wall, had only been started in 1485.

• 4. Inside the Flame

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  The floor plan Ivan's architects chose was more orderly than the cathedral's exterior suggests. Rather than the ad hoc arrangement of seven wooden churches around a central core, they imposed a symmetrical scheme of eight side churches around the centre. The four larger churches sit on the four major compass points and are octagonal in plan. The four smaller diagonal churches are cuboid, though their shape is obscured by later additions. Each side church sits on a massive foundation; the smaller ones rest on raised platforms, giving them the appearance of hovering above ground.

  The building is not perfectly symmetrical despite that orderly plan. The central church was deliberately shifted to the west from the geometric centre of the side churches, to make room for its larger apse on the eastern side. Viewed from the north or south, the result is a complex multi-axial silhouette. Viewed from the west, facing the Kremlin, the facade appears monolithic and properly symmetrical, an effect reinforced by the fortress-style machicolation of the westernmost Church of Entry into Jerusalem, which mirrors the real fortifications directly across the square.

  Inside, the building is a labyrinth of narrow vaulted corridors and vertical cylinders. The largest space, the central Church of the Intercession, rises 46 metres internally but covers a floor area of only 64 square metres. The corridors functioned as internal parvises; the western corridor, which features a unique flat caissoned ceiling, also served as the narthex. Within the brick walls, restorers who worked on the building in 1954 and 1955 found something unexpected: a wooden frame running the full height of the church. It was made of elaborately tied thin studs and had been erected as a life-size spatial model of the future building, then gradually enclosed in solid masonry.

• 5. The Living Role of Jerusalem

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  For more than a century after its completion, Trinity Church was not experienced by Muscovites as a single building. The ground-floor arcades were open, and visitors could see the nine distinct churches standing on their common base, resembling at a distance the towers and churches of a citadel rising above a defensive wall. Clergy and public alike understood it as a generalized allegory of the Orthodox Heavenly City, the earthly symbol of the Heavenly Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelation.

  That allegory was enacted annually in the Palm Sunday procession, in which the patriarch of Moscow rode a donkey while the tsar led it by the bridle. The procession moved from the Dormition Church, passed through St. Frol's Gate, and ended at Trinity Cathedral, which served as the stand-in for the Temple in Jerusalem. A foreign observer recorded the scene in language that has survived: the church was "all clad in shiny bright gems, called Jerusalem," and the tsar led the Patriarch "sitting on a donkey, on the Palm Holiday." The last of these donkey walks took place in 1693.

  The church of Basil the Blessed was added to the complex in 1588, built over the grave of the venerated local saint Vasily, who had died in 1552. A second local fool, Ivan the Blessed, was buried on the grounds in 1589, and a sanctuary in his memory was established inside the south-eastern arcade in 1672. It was the name of Basil, not Trinity or Intercession, that became attached to the building in the popular imagination at the beginning of the 17th century and has endured in Western usage ever since, though strictly speaking that name belongs only to the small chapel built over his grave.

  Conrad Bussow recorded a moment that captures the cathedral's civic weight. On the 3rd of June 1606, during the triumph of False Dmitry I, several thousand men followed a boyar with a letter through all of Moscow to "the main church they call Jerusalem that stands right next to the Kremlin gates," where the pretender was raised on the Lobnoye Mesto rostrum and proclaimed before the crowd.

• 6. Survival Through Violence and Politics

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  French troops who occupied Moscow in 1812 stabled their horses inside the cathedral and looted everything portable. Napoleon ordered the building blown up when his forces withdrew. The troops failed to carry out the order, and the cathedral survived the Fire of Moscow that burned Kitai-gorod that same year. Interiors were repaired in 1813 and the exterior in 1816.

  Preservationists called for a proper restoration throughout the 1880s and 1890s, but funding from national authorities in Saint Petersburg and local ones in Moscow was repeatedly denied. The church had no congregation of its own and depended entirely on donations. In 1899, Nicholas II reluctantly acknowledged that restoration was necessary, but again every state and municipal office, including the Holy Synod, refused to finance it. The restoration headed by Andrey Pavlinov and Sergey Solovyov dragged on from 1896 to 1909, raising around 100,000 roubles in total through public campaigning.

  The Soviet period brought the gravest threat. The church was headed during World War I by protoiereus Ioann Vostorgov, a nationalist preacher and leader of the Black-Hundredist Union of the Russian People. Bolsheviks arrested Vostorgov in 1918 on a charge of embezzling nationalized church properties; he was executed in 1919. The building became a public museum in 1923, though services continued until 1929, when it was completely secularized.

  In the first half of the 1930s the cathedral became an obstacle to Moscow party boss Lazar Kaganovich's reconstruction plans for Red Square. A frequently retold story holds that Kaganovich picked up a scale model of the church while envisioning Red Square without it, and Stalin sharply told him: "Lazar, put it back!" Stalin's master planner, architect Vladimir Semyonov, reportedly grabbed Stalin's elbow when the leader lifted the model to see how the square would look, and was replaced by the more compliant Sergey Chernyshov. In the autumn of 1933, the church was struck from the heritage register. Preservationist Pyotr Baranovsky was summoned to conduct a last-minute survey before scheduled demolition, then arrested for protesting against it. While he served his sentence in the Gulag, attitudes shifted, and by 1937 even hard-line Bolshevik planners accepted that the building should be spared.

• 7. Colour, Renovation, and the Present

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  The vivid, multicoloured appearance that makes Saint Basil's instantly recognizable today was not part of the original design. The original colour scheme followed the description of the Heavenly City in the Book of Revelation, with walls mixing bare red brickwork and painted brick imitation with white ornaments, and domes uniformly gilded in tin. Modest ceramic inserts of green and blue provided what the source describes as "a touch of rainbow as prescribed by the Bible." The present-day palette accumulated across several rounds of change between the 1680s and 1848.

  The most significant transformation came in 1680-1683. The nine previously separate churches were visually fused into a single building when the formerly open ground-floor arcades were filled with brick walls. The new interior space housed altars relocated from thirteen former wooden churches. The old detached belfry was demolished; its square basement was reused for a new belltower built in the vernacular style of the reign of Alexis I. In 1683 the church received a tiled cornice in yellow and blue bearing a written history of the building in Old Slavic typeface.

  By 1800, paintings by Fyodor Alekseyev show the cathedral hemmed in by a chaotic cluster of commercial buildings, with rows of shops transforming Red Square into a closed yard. The moat that had given the church part of its official name was filled in 1801 in preparation for the coronation of Alexander I. Urban planner Joseph Bove subsequently cleared the rubble around the church and created Vasilyevskaya Square between the cathedral and the Kremlin wall, completing the southern side of the terrace in 1834. The domes acquired their present-day colours in 1848.

  The building was designated part of the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1990. Weekly liturgical services were restored in 1997, after a gap that stretched back to 1929. The last major renovation was completed in September 2008 with the opening of the restored sanctuary of St. Alexander Svirsky, one of the ten individual chapels that together make up this singular building.