Saint Basil's Cathedral

Look up at the southern edge of Red Square. Ten domes rise into the sky above you. Each one is shaped and painted in its own way. Some twist upward like rope. Some are cut into sharp facets that catch the light. Their colors run from red to green to gold to deep blue. No two of them match. This is Saint Basil's Cathedral. In all the world, there is nothing else quite like it. Many people stop walking the moment they see it.

The building carries a long formal name. It honors the Intercession of the Mother of God. For that reason many Russians call it the Pokrovsky Cathedral. But most people know it by the name of a single man. Basil was a holy fool who lived in Moscow in the sixteenth century. People believed he could see the truth, and that he spoke it even to the tsar. He went without shoes, even in deep winter. He was buried beside the church, and over time his name settled onto the whole building.

The cathedral was built between 1555 and 1561. The order came from Ivan the Fourth, the ruler history remembers as Ivan the Terrible. He raised it to mark a victory in war. His army had captured the city of Kazan, far to the east, after a long siege. Each separate church inside the cathedral honors a saint or a feast that fell on an important day of that campaign. The building is, in a way, a record of a war told in brick and stone.

Walk slowly all the way around the outside. You can count nine separate chapels. Eight of them stand in a ring around one tall central tower. They all sit together on a single raised platform of brick. From down on the square, the chapels seem to lean toward one another and crowd for space. But the plan behind them is exact and careful. Seen from high above, the nine chapels form the clean points of a star.

There is a famous legend about the architect. The story says that Ivan was so pleased with the finished work that he ordered the builder blinded. That way, the tale goes, the man could never design anything as fine again. It is a powerful story, and guides have told it for generations. But it is only a legend. Records point to a builder named Postnik Yakovlev, and he appears to have gone on working on other projects for years afterward.

The bright colors surprise almost everyone. They were not there at the start. For its first hundred years or so, the cathedral was mostly white, and its domes were gold or plain metal. The colors you see today arrived slowly, layer by layer. Much of the painting belongs to the seventeenth century and the years after it. Each generation seemed to add its own touch, until the whole surface became the patterned thing you see today.

Step inside, and the feeling changes completely. There is no single great hall under one roof. Instead the chapels are small, tall, and narrow, like the insides of separate towers. Steep stairways and low passages link them together. The walls are covered with painted flowers, climbing vines, and fine patterns. Candles light the gold of the screens. Sound moves strangely in here. A voice singing in one chapel can travel through the stone and reach you in another.

For hundreds of years the cathedral stood at the center of public life. Tsars passed it on their way to great ceremonies. Crowds filled the square around it on feast days and holidays. It marked the southern end of Red Square, like a full stop at the edge of the open space. Foreign travelers who reached Moscow wrote home about its strange, joyful, almost unreal shape.

The twentieth century nearly took the cathedral away. After the revolution of 1917, the new state closed many churches across the country. By some accounts, officials wanted this one removed to clear more space for parades on the square. In the end it was spared. In 1929 it was turned into a museum, and a museum it has remained ever since, through war and through change.

Today the cathedral is part of the State Historical Museum. In 1990 it was added, together with Red Square and the Kremlin, to the list of World Heritage sites. On certain holy days, religious services are held inside once more. And high in the towers, the old bells still swing and sound out across the square below.

Give the small details your time. Look closely at how the brick itself is cut and laid into arches, points, and ledges. Find the narrow, deep-set windows. Watch how each painted line follows the exact curve of the dome it climbs. The cathedral was made to be read slowly. The longer you look at it, the more it seems to offer back to you.

Saint Basil's Cathedral has stood here for more than four hundred and fifty years. In that time it has watched armies, rulers, and ordinary crowds arrive and pass away. And still it surprises nearly every person who rounds the corner and meets it for the first time. So stand here for a moment longer. Let the building take its time. And let it surprise you too.