The Church of the Intercession of the Virgin "on the Moat", also called the Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed, rises on the Red Square of Moscow, next to the Kremlin, opposite the Spasskaya Tower. It was erected here in 1561 in memory of the capture of Kazan by the Russian army - the capital of the powerful khanate, which threatened Russia even centuries after the end of the Tatar-Mongol yoke.
The second (popular) name was given to the temple in honor of the saint who was revered by Muscovites, who was a contemporary of the construction of the cathedral, buried under its porch.
But initially the temple did not look like it now! Look …
What stood earlier on the site of the Intercession Cathedral is not known exactly. Russian chronicles contain fragmentary and contradictory reports of wooden and stone churches. This gave rise to many guesses, versions and legends.
According to one version, shortly after the return of Ivan IV the Terrible from the Kazan campaign in 1552, on the site of the future Church of the Intercession on the Moat on the edge of the Moskva River, a wooden church in the name of the Life-Giving Trinity with seven chapels was laid on a hill.
Saint Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow advised Ivan the Terrible to build a stone church here. Metropolitan Macarius also had the main compositional idea of the future church.
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The very first reliable mention of the construction of the Church of the Intercession of Our Lady dates back to the fall of 1554. It is believed that it was a wooden cathedral. It stood a little more than six months and was dismantled before the start of the construction of the stone cathedral in the spring of 1555.
The Cathedral of the Intercession was erected by the Russian architects Barma and Postnik (there is a version that Postnik and Barma are the names of one person). According to legend, so that the architects could not create a new better creation, Tsar Ivan IV, upon completion of the construction of an outstanding masterpiece of architecture, ordered them to be blinded. Subsequently, the inconsistency of this fiction was proved.
The construction of the temple took only 6 years and only in the warm season. The chronicle contains a description of the "miraculous" acquisition by the masters of the ninth, southern throne, after the entire construction was almost completed. However, the clear symmetry inherent in the cathedral convinces us that the architects initially had an idea of the compositional structure of the future temple: it was supposed to put eight aisles around the central ninth church. The temple was built of bricks, and the foundation, plinth and some decorative elements were made of white stone.
By the fall of 1559, the cathedral was largely completed. On the feast of the Intercession of the Mother of God, all the churches were consecrated, with the exception of the central one, since "the larger church of the middle Intercession was not completed that year."
The prefix "on the Moat", found in the chronicles of the cathedral, is due to the fact that a deep and wide defensive ditch ran along the Kremlin wall from the 14th century across the entire square, later called Red, along the Kremlin wall, which was filled up in 1813.
In its original form, the cathedral existed until 1588. Then, from the northeastern side, the tenth church was added to it over the grave of the holy fool Basil the Blessed, who spent a lot of time at the cathedral under construction and bequeathed to be buried next to it. The famous Moscow miracle worker died in 1557, and after his canonization, the son of Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible, Fyodor Ioannovich ordered to build a church. In architectural terms, it was an independent pillarless temple with a separate entrance.
The place where the relics of Basil the Blessed were found was marked with a silver shrine, which was later lost during the Time of Troubles, at the beginning of the 17th century. Divine services in the church of the saint soon became daily, and starting from the 17th century, the name of the chapel was gradually transferred to the entire cathedral, becoming its "popular" name: St. Basil's Cathedral.
At the end of the 16th century, figured chapters of the cathedral appeared - to replace the original burnt-out cover.
In 1672, the eleventh church was added to the cathedral from the southeast: a small church over the grave of St. John the Blessed - the revered Moscow holy fool, buried near the cathedral in 1589.
The cathedral had an unusual architectural composition - 9 independent churches were built on a single foundation - a basement - and were connected by internal arched passages surrounding the central temple.
The architecture of the temples is reduced to three types: hipped roof, large tower and small tower. All of them are united by using a single compositional technique "octagon on a quadruple" - this means that the octahedron is placed on a cubic base. But the volumes of the premises are different, and their combinations are unusual. As one of the main researchers of the cathedral writes, A. L. Batalov, "similarity and difference, unity and isolation - the reconciliation of these contradictory principles becomes the main theme in the architecture of the cathedral and meets the main idea of its program."
The most vivid and vivid statement about this temple belongs to 20-year-old Mikhail Lermontov: “… behind the wall itself, which descends from the mountain to the right and ends in a round corner tower, covered like scales with green tiles; a little to the left of this tower are the innumerable domes of the Church of St. Basil the Blessed, whose seventy aisles (this, of course, is not so - AK) all foreigners marvel at, and which not a single Russian has bothered to describe in detail."
Almost 100 years later, the artist Aristarkh Lentulov saw this cathedral as an exotic "bouquet".
The German naturalist of the first half of the 19th century, Johann Heinrich Blasius, who visited Russia in 1840, initially mistook it for a group of rocks or a colossal plant. But this is what he discovered later: “Only after climbing upstairs, you begin to understand little by little that all parts of the temple are located symmetrically …”.
And - the natural ending: "Instead of a tangled discordant labyrinth, this ultra-national architectural work reveals exemplary order and correctness full of meaning" (!) In the mouth of a pedantic German, such an assessment is undoubtedly the highest praise.
Let's look at the cathedral first from above, from the domes. How many are there?
An arbitrary heap of domes is excluded, this is just a deliberately prepared by the creators of the temple an optical illusion. In addition, the patterned chapters are not original. At the end of the 16th century, they replaced the victims of the fire with much more strict and more modest "helmets".
Let's start from the head above the central tent. It is immediately evident that around the main tent there are 4 small chapters on low reels on diagonals, under which there are three rows of semicircular kokoshniks "running over". Imagine for a moment that there are no large chapters next to them. And now, before us is a five-domed temple, differing only in a sharply elevated central part: 1 + 4 = 5.
Now let's count the rest of the domes. There are only 4 of them, and they are located on the cardinal points around the main tent, which also goes back to the five-domed traditional for Byzantine and Russian churches, although much rarer than the first. And here: 1 + 4 = 5.
We do not take into account the small low dome to the left of the altar - this is the head of the chapel over the relics of St. Basil the Blessed, it appeared here later, in 1588. In the same way, it will be necessary to exclude from it the tent-roofed bell tower, built in 1683 instead of the previous belfry to the right of the altar. And then it turns out that the impression of incredible, incomprehensible multi-domed is achieved by a simple combination of two traditional five-domed temples, as if inserted into one another. In this case, it turns out, of course, not 10, but 9 - the central tent "works" for both five-domes.
But drawings made by foreigners, as well as ancient inventories of the cathedral, allow us to say that there were much more domes here.
Outside, along the perimeter of the main tent, there were 8 (!) Very small chapters. 4 of the same domes stood around the largest, the Entry into Jerusalem chapel, located in the center of the western facade of the cathedral, opposite the Spasskaya Tower. Alas, during the renovation of the 1780s, they were dismantled - apparently, to the era of classicism, this forest of domes (9 + 8 + 4 = 21 !!!) seemed "architectural excess". It's a pity…
