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On October 14, 1991, St. Basil\u2019s Cathedral was reopened for church services after six decades of being barred from hosting religious rites. Here are five fun facts about the world\u2019s most famous onion domes.<\/p>\n
1. The Cathedral was a public museum during the Soviet period<\/strong>. Although official Soviet doctrine replaced all religious practice with a sturdy Marxist atheism and many churches across Russia were demolished, St. Basil\u2019s Cathedral lived on at the heart of Red Square in central Moscow. Its existence was threatened multiple times, especially in the early years of Soviet rule and under Stalin. One Soviet architect even\u00a0went to the Gulag about it, telling the Kremlin point-blank that he wouldn\u2019t demolish the historic building.<\/p>\n 2. It has almost as many names as onion domes<\/strong>. For example:<\/p>\n In fact, the reason it has about as many names as domes is that the cathedral as a whole is made up of nine individual chapels. Not all of the names used to describe the entire building refer to individual chapels, but that\u2019s certainly one source of confusion.<\/p>\n 3. It\u2019s a church with a military background<\/strong>. Ivan IV (also known as \u201cThe Terrible\u201d) commissioned the church to commemorate Russia’s victory in Kazan\u2019 and Astrakhan, one of the first major victories restoring Russian land from the Kazan Khanate (1552-1554). St. Basil, known as a \u201choly fool,\u201d was perhaps the only person to stand up to Ivan the Terrible about the lives lost under his rule, and is\u00a0rumored to be\u00a0the one thing Ivan feared. And the building\u2019s bloody background doesn\u2019t end there. Popular legend has it that after the cathedral was completed, Ivan IV ordered for the architect to be\u00a0blinded\u00a0so he could never complete a work of comparable beauty. Exactly who that architect was and whether the story is true, however, remains a mystery.<\/p>\n 4. The architecture is still kind of a mystery<\/strong>. How architects in the 16th century had figured out how to build such a complex, many-spired structure without design drawings was an enigma for centuries. But in 1954-1955 \u2013 notably, soon after Stalin\u2019s death in 1953 and at the start of Khrushchev\u2019s reforms \u2013 the historical landmark was restored, at which time the trick behind the architecture became clear. Restorers\u00a0observed\u00a0that the walls of the building had been outlined with thin timbers before all the ornamentation went up \u2013 a trick that basically gave a three-dimensional blueprint. Working from that image for what the completed structure would look like was a handy guide for the bricklayers.<\/p>\n 5.\u00a0Those wild colors are more newfangled than you might think<\/strong>. That\u2019s right: the cathedral used to be white and its domes were gold. Up until the late 19th century, the Kremlin was\u00a0painted white, and the Cathedral matched. The red brick and multicolored decorations are a more recent addition, with the current paint scheme created\u00a0in 1860.<\/p>\n\n
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