Moscow Guide
Red Square
St Basil's Cathedral
Opening time: May– Oct daily 11am–6pm; Nov– April Mon, Wed– Sun 11am–5pm
Price: R100, camera or video permits R130
No description can do justice to the inimitable St Basil's Cathedral. It was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible to celebrate his capture of the Tatar stronghold of Kazan in 1552, on the feast day of the Intercession of the Virgin. Officially named the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin by the Moat (after the moat that then ran beside the Kremlin), its popular title commemorates a "holy fool", St Basil the Blessed (1468–1552), who came to Ivan's notice in 1547 when he foretold the fire that swept Moscow that year, and was later buried in the Trinity Cathedral which then stood on this site. St Basil's was built in 1555–60, most likely by Postnik Yakovlev (nicknamed "Barma" – the Mumbler) who, legend has it, was afterwards blinded on the tsar's orders so that he could never create anything to rival the cathedral (in fact he went on to build another cathedral in Vladimir).
Despite its apparent disorder, there is an underlying symmetry to the cathedral, which has eight domed chapels (four large and octagonal, the others smaller and squarish) symbolizing the eight assaults on Kazan, clustered around a central, lofty tent-roofed spire, whose cupola was compared by the poet Lermontov to "the cut-glass stopper of an antique carafe". In 1588 Tsar Fyodor added a ninth chapel on the northeastern side, to accommodate the remains of St Basil; its small yellow-and-green cupola is studded with orange pyramids. Rather than using the main arcaded staircase, visitors enter through an inconspicuous door near the ticket kiosk (which closes for thirty minutes at lunchtime, and an hour before the cathedral does).
The interior is a psychedelic maze of galleries painted with floral or geometric patterns, that wends from one chapel to another and from level to level via narrow stairways whose low arches were designed to make even the most exalted worshipper stoop in humility. St Basil occupies a silver casket in a chapel on the lower floor, whose gaudy magnificence is echoed by the red, blue and gold iconostasis in the Chapel of the Intercession, upstairs.