History Atlas

Tsar Ivan has celebrated his victories over …

Years: 1561 - 1561

Tsar Ivan has celebrated his victories over Kazan and Astrakhan by building several churches with oriental features, most famously Saint Basil's Cathedral on what is today Red Square in Moscow.

The site of the cathedral had been, historically, a busy marketplace between the St. Frol's (later Savior's) Gate of the Moscow Kremlin and the outlying posad, or settlement.

The center of the marketplace is marked by the Trinity Church, built of the same white stone as the Kremlin of Dmitry Donskoy (1366–1368) and its cathedrals.

Tsar Ivan IV has marked every victory of the Russo-Kazan War by erecting a wooden memorial church next to the walls of Trinity Church; by the end of his Astrakhan campaign, it is literally shrouded within a cluster of seven wooden churches.

According to the sketchy report in Nikon's Chronicle, in the autumn of 1554 Ivan had ordered construction of a wooden Church of Intercession on the same site, "on the moat".

One year later Ivan had ordered construction of a new stone cathedral on the site of Trinity Church that will commemorate his campaigns.

Dedication of a church to a military victory is a major innovation for Muscovy.

The placement of the church outside of the Kremlin walls is a political statement in favor of posad commoners, and against hereditary boyars.

The cathedral, completed in 1561, marks the geometric center of the city and the hub of its growth since the fourteenth century.

The original building, known as "Trinity Church" and later "Trinity Cathedral", contains eight side churches arranged around the ninth, central church of Intercession.

The building's design, shaped as a flame of a bonfire rising into the sky, has no analogues in preceding, contemporary or later Russian of Byzantine architecture, even remote.

Foundations, traditional to medieval Moscow, are built of white stone, while the churches themselves are built of red brick (28×14×8 centimeters), a relatively new material (the first attested brick building in Moscow, the new Kremlin Wall, was constructed in 1485).