DailyCelestialChallenge Wednesday: Structures

St. Basil's Cathedral, Russia

The Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin next to the moat, better known as St. Basil's Cathedral, is an Orthodox temple located on the Red Square in the city of Moscow, Russia. It is world famous for its bulbous domes. Despite what is popularly thought, the Cathedral of St. Basil is neither the seat of the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow, nor the main cathedral of the Russian capital, since in both cases it is the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. As part of the Red Square, the St. Basil's Cathedral was included since 1990, together with the Kremlin as a whole, on the Unesco World Heritage List

The construction of the cathedral was ordered by Tsar Ivan the Terrible to commemorate the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan, and was carried out between 1555 and 1561. In 1588, Tsar Theodore I of Russia ordered the addition of a new chapel on the east side of the construction, on the tomb of San Basilio the Blessed one, santo by which the cathedral began to be called popularly.

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

The place of the church had been, historically, a crowded market between the Port of the Tower of San Frol (after Del Salvador) of the Moscow Kremlin and the peripheral posad. The center of the market was marked by the church of the Trinity, built with the same white stone as the Kremlin of Dmitri Donskoi (1366-1368) and its cathedrals. Tsar Ivan IV marked each victory of the war with the Khanate of Kazan by erecting a wooden memorial church next to the walls of the Church of the Trinity, which at the end of his Campaign in Astrakhan was surrounded by a group of seven churches of wood. According to the incomplete report in the Chronicle of Nikon, in the autumn of 1554 Ivan ordered the construction of the church of the Intercession of wood in the same place, "in the pit". A year later, Ivan had a new stone cathedral built in the place of the church of the Trinity that would commemorate his campaigns. Dedicating a church to a military victory at the time was "a great innovation" for Muscovy. The placement of the church outside the walls of the Kremlin was a political statement in favor of the comunado posad and against the hereditary boyars

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Because the church has no similarities in the earlier, contemporary or later architecture of the Byzantine cultural tradition and of Muscovy in general, the sources that inspired Barma and Posstnik are disputed. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc rejected the European roots of the cathedral. According to him, the arches in the corbel were Byzantine and finally from Asia.

Russian writers of the nineteenth century, beginning with Ivan Zabelin, emphasized the influence of the native wooden churches of northern Russia. Their motives found their way into masonry, particularly votive churches that did not need to house important congregations.

Instead of following the original ad hoc design (seven churches around the central core), Ivan's architects opted for a more symmetrical plane with eight side churches around the nucleus

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The central core and the four largest churches placed in the four main cardinal points are octagonal. The four smaller churches arranged diagonally are cuboids, although their shape is barely visible because of later additions

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