In the mid 1550s, after capturing Kazan and Astrakhan, Ivan the Terrible ordered a stone church on Red Square to replace the temporary wooden churches he usually built to mark victories. He placed it outside the Kremlin walls in the muddy Kitay-gorod market, a deliberate move to connect with commoners rather than the boyars. Heritage records name the builders as Barma and Postnik Yakovlev, possibly one person, and the design broke with Byzantine rules: a central octagonal core ringed by eight chapels, with a tented roof rising like a 150 foot flame. Restorers later found the masons had built a life size wooden skeleton and bricked around it. The famous legend that Ivan blinded the architect is false; he went on to build fortifications in Kazan.

The 1561 original was nine separate chapels on an open arcaded platform, later bricked in during renovations in the 1580s and 1680s and given an asymmetrical bell tower. In 1588 a tenth chapel went up over the grave of Vasily, or Basil, a holy fool who walked Moscow’s markets naked in winter and openly criticized Ivan. The public ignored the official name, Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat, and called it St. Basil’s. Napoleon’s troops stabled horses in it in 1812 and tried to blow it up, but rain soaked the fuses. In the 1930s Lazar Kaganovich planned its demolition to clear Red Square for parades, and restorer Pyotr Baranovsky refused to measure it for dynamite, was sent to the gulag, and saw the plan shelved by 1937.

• The original palette of raw red brick, white stone, and gilded tin domes, meant to evoke the heavenly city of Revelation
• The Palm Sunday ritual in which the Tsar led the Patriarch’s donkey on foot across Red Square to the church locals called Jerusalem
• How Italian masons who came north after the fall of Constantinople worked beside Russian timber carpenters
• The legend of Stalin telling Kaganovich “Lazar, put it back” versus Baranovsky’s documented telegrams and threats
• Soviet confiscation and museum conversion in the 1920s, and the return of weekly Sunday services in 1997