Saint Basil's Cathedral
Sixteenth-century cathedral of ten churches on Red Square, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The cathedral, properly the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat, was built between 1555 and 1561 on the order of Tsar Ivan IV to mark the capture of the Kazan Khanate. Its plan sets eight churches around a central ninth, each dedicated to a feast falling on a day of the campaign, and all raised on a single podium. A tenth church was added in 1588 over the grave of Basil the Blessed, the holy fool whose popular name later attached to the whole building.
The familiar coloured and patterned onion domes are not original but were given their present form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the brickwork below carries painted ornament of several periods. Inside, the churches are small and linked by low painted galleries, with icon screens and wall painting from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The cathedral became a museum in 1928 and is now a branch of the State Historical Museum; with the Kremlin and Red Square it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1990.
Highlights
- Nine churches of 1555-61 grouped on one podium, plus the 1588 chapel
- Coloured onion domes reshaped in the 17th and 18th centuries
- Painted galleries and icon screens spanning four centuries
- Part of the Kremlin and Red Square UNESCO World Heritage site
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