Saint Basil's cathedral

The Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin by the moat , better known as St. Basil's Cathedral, an Orthodox temple is located in the Red Square in Moscow city, Russia. It is famous worldwide for its bulbous domes. Despite what is commonly thought popularly, St. Basil's Cathedral is not the seat of the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow, nor the main cathedral of the Russian capital, since in both cases is the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. As part of Red Square, St. Basil's Cathedral was included since 1990, along with the whole Kremlin, in the list of World Heritage of Unesco.

The construction of the cathedral was ordered by Tsar Ivan the Terrible to commemorate the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan, and was conducted between 1555 and 1561. In 1588 Tsar Feodor I of Russia sent a chapel added on the east side of building on the tomb of St. Basil the Blessed saint which was popularly called the cathedral.

San Basilio is located at the southeast end of Red Square, just across from the Spasskaya Tower (Savior Tower) of the Kremlin and the Church of St. John the Baptist in Dyakovo.

In a garden opposite the church the monument to Minin and Pozharsky, a bronze statue in honor of Dmitry Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin, who gathered volunteers for the army that fought against the Polish invaders during the tumultuous period known as rises.

The initial concept was to build a group of chapels, dedicated to each of the saints on which day the Tsar won a battle, but the construction of a central tower unifies these spaces in a single cathedral.

Legend has it that the Tsar Ivan blinded the architect Postnik Yakovlev to prevent projected construction that could overcome this, but it seems clear that it is not more than a confabulation, as Yakovlev participated last few years, construction Kazan Kremlin.



St. Basil's Cathedral should not be confused with the Kremlin, which is located next to it on the Red Square, and thus not part of it. Still, many media confuse the two buildings.
The place of the church had been, historically, a busy market between the gate of the Tower of San Frol (after Salvador) Moscow Kremlin and peripheral posad. The market center was marked by the Trinity Church, built with the Kremlin Dmitri Donskoi (1366-1368) and the same white stone cathedrals. Ivan IV czar marked each victory of the war with the Khanate of Kazan to erect a memorial wooden church next to the walls of Trinity Church, which at the end of his campaign in Astrakhan was surrounded by a group of seven churches wood. According to the incomplete report in the Chronicle of Nikon, in the fall of 1554 Ivan ordered the construction of the Church of the Intersection of wood in the same place, "in the pit". A year later, Ivan built a new stone cathedral on the site of the Church of the Trinity commemorate their campaigns. Dedicating a church to a military victory then was "a great innovation" for Muscovy. The placement of the church outside the Kremlin walls was a policy in favor of posad commoners and against the boyars statement hereditarios.2

the identity of arquitecto.3 Tradition has it that there were two architects, Barma and Postnik is unknown. The official registration of the Russian Cultural Heritage list as "Barma and Postnik Yakovlev" 4 researchers have proposed that both names refer to the same person, Postnik Yakovlev, whose pen name was Ivan Yakovlevich Barma (Varfolomey) .5 Legend holds that Ivan blinded the architect so he could not recreate the artwork elsewhere, July 6 although the true Postnik Yakovlev remained active at least throughout the decade of 1560.8 There is evidence that construction involved stonemasons Pskov9 and German lands.