It would be hard to say which is the foremost symbol of red square the towering Kremlin Walls and its towers or the almost, and I mean almost, fairy tale looking St Basil's Cathedral - there is just something about that too me is almost sinister.
Courtesy of Wikipedia: The Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed commonly known as Saint Basil's Cathedral, is a church in Red Square in Moscow, Russia and is one of the most recognizable symbols of the country. The building, now a museum, is officially known as the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat or Pokrovsky Cathedral. It was built from 1555 to 1561 on orders from Ivan the Terrible and commemorates the capture of Kazan and Astrakhan. It was the city's tallest building until the completion of the Ivan the Great Bell Tower in 1600. The Saint Basil's Cathedral is not to be confused with the Moscow Kremlin.
The original building, known as Trinity Church and later Trinity Cathedral, contained eight churches arranged around a ninth, central church of Intercession; a tenth church was erected in 1588 over the grave of venerated local saint Vasily (Basil). In the 16th and 17th centuries, the church, perceived (as with all churches in Byzantine Christianity) as the earthly symbol of the Heavenly City, was popularly known as the "Jerusalem" and served as an allegory of the Jerusalem Temple in the annual Palm Sunday parade attended by the Patriarch of Moscow and the Tsar.
The building is shaped like the flame of a bonfire rising into the sky, a design that has no parallel in Russian architecture. Dmitry Shvidkovsky, in his book Russian Architecture and the West, states that "it is like no other Russian building. Nothing similar can be found in the entire millennium of Byzantine tradition from the fifth to the fifteenth century ... a strangeness that astonishes by its unexpectedness, complexity and dazzling interleaving of the manifold details of its design." The cathedral foreshadowed the climax of Russian national architecture in the 17th century.
As part of the program of state atheism, the church was confiscated from the Russian Orthodox community as part of the Soviet Union's anti-theist campaigns and has operated as a division of the State Historical Museum since 1928. It was completely secularized in 1929 and remains a federal property of the Russian Federation. The church has been part of the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990. It is not actually within the Kremlin, but often served as a visual metonym for Russia and the USSR in western media throughout the Cold War and to the modern day. Since 1997 weekly orthodox christian services with prayer to St. Basil restored in St. Basil church.
A couple of interesting things I was told are:
- Cathedrals were redesignated as Museums doing the early days of the Soviet era to protect them from demolition;
- Basil was originally perceived as a madman as he roamed Moscow stark naked. It was only after he started performing miracles by healing people and making prophesies such as one where he saw Nizhny Novgorod burning which subsequently happened that he became revered.
So along with Julia and Marsha I purchased a ticket and entered the maze that is St Basil's Cathedral via it's "crypts". Below are some photos from these areas:
The first floor was very intriguing with the central church and surrounding churches. There were a number of very old idols on display and the centre church alter and a couple of others were still in place.
Finally I'm not into this kind of music but a group of male singers, Doros Male Vocal Ensemble, were performing while we were in the building and the acoustics made it quite soul stirring. We sat and watched them perform a number which you can view here
