Saint Basil's Cathedral

Saint Basil's Cathedral, officially the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat, stands at the southern end of Red Square in Moscow, opposite the Spasskaya Tower of the Kremlin.

Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible, ordered the church to mark the capture of Kazan from the Tatars in 1552, and it was built between 1555 and 1561. Chronicles name the architects as Barma and Postnik Yakovlev. A story that Ivan had them blinded so they could never build anything as beautiful is a legend without evidence. The church took its popular name from St Basil the Blessed, a holy fool buried in a chapel added in 1588. The painted colours were added in stages from the 1680s to 1848, and today's scheme dates from the restoration of 1896 to 1909.

The building is a group of nine chapels on a common base: a central church topped by a tent-shaped tower, surrounded by eight smaller chapels with onion domes, each with a different pattern. Inside, narrow passages and staircases link the chapels, whose walls are painted with floral designs and icons. The cathedral forms part of the Kremlin and Red Square UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The cathedral operates as a branch of the State Historical Museum and charges an entry fee; Orthodox services have been held regularly since 1997, with a Sunday liturgy at 10 am. Opening hours and closure days change with the season.

A 47.5-metre central church and its many onion domes

The central tent-roofed church rises to about 47.5 metres. Around it, each of the eight side chapels is crowned by its own onion dome, and the later chapel of St Basil and the bell tower add more, so counts of ten domes are common. No two domes share the same pattern of ribs, scales or spirals.

Survival through 1812 and the Soviet years

The building came close to destruction twice. During the French occupation of Moscow in 1812, Napoleon's troops stabled horses in the church and looted it, and an order to blow it up failed. The cathedral survived the great fire of Moscow that year.

After the revolution it was taken from the Orthodox Church during the antireligious campaigns of the 1920s. It opened as a public museum in 1923 and became part of the State Historical Museum in 1928. Services stopped in 1929, and it stayed purely a museum until regular worship returned in 1997.