St. Basil's Cathedral

The site had long been a marketplace outside the Kremlin's St Frol's Gate. Ivan IV marked each victory of the Russo-Kazan War with a wooden memorial church there; by the end of his Astrakhan campaign seven such churches clustered on the site. In autumn 1554 he ordered a wooden Church of the Intercession built "on the moat," and a year later a single stone cathedral to commemorate the campaigns — a major innovation for Muscovy, dedicating a church to a military victory. It was consecrated on 12 July 1561 and took the status of sobor, a large assembly church.

The architect's identity is disputed. Tradition names two builders, Barma and Postnik; some argue the names belong to one man, Postnik Yakovlev, recorded afterward working on the Cathedral of the Annunciation and the walls of the Kazan Kremlin — evidence against the legend that Ivan had the architect blinded so he could never build its equal elsewhere. Stonemasons from Pskov and German lands took part in construction.

The original Trinity Church burned in 1583 and was repaired by 1593. A ninth sanctuary, dedicated to Basil (Vasily) the Blessed, a local ascetic who died in 1552 and was buried on the site, was added in 1588; a tenth followed in 1672, over the grave of another local ascetic, Ivan the Blessed, buried there in 1589.

The most substantial rebuilding came in 1680–1683: open ground-floor arcades were filled with brick, creating the wrap-around galleries and tented porch roofs seen today; the old detached belfry was replaced by a new belltower; and altars from thirteen wooden churches that had stood over the site of Ivan's executions in Red Square were moved into the new ground floor. In 1683 the cathedral was given a tiled cornice in yellow and blue, inscribed in Old Slavic script with a history of the building.

The moat that gave the cathedral its formal name, the Church of the Intercession "on the Moat," was filled in ahead of Alexander I's 1801 coronation. French troops occupying Moscow in 1812 used the cathedral as stables and looted it; it survived the fire that destroyed the surrounding Kitai-gorod district and an order from Napoleon to blow it up, which retreating troops failed to carry out. Interiors were repaired in 1813, the exterior in 1816.

The architect Joseph Bove then cleared the rubble around the cathedral, shaving back the Kremlin hill's crest to open Red Square to the Moskva River and creating Vasilyevskaya Square; the southern side of his terrace wall along the square was completed in 1834. Minor repairs continued until 1848, when the domes took on their present colours.

Preservation societies pressed for a proper restoration through the 1880s and 1890s, but the cathedral had no congregation of its own and depended on public donations that were slow to arrive; state and municipal bodies, including the Holy Synod, declined to pay for it even after Nicholas II accepted in 1899 that the work was needed. A restoration headed by Andrey Pavlinov, who died in 1898, and Sergey Solovyov ran from 1896 to 1909, raising roughly 100,000 roubles from private donors. Solovyov replaced the tin roofing installed in the 1810s, finding original tiles missing or discoloured, and chose the deep red and green paintwork, reconstructed from medieval miniatures, that the cathedral still wears.

The cathedral's priest, Ioann Vostorgov, was arrested by the Bolsheviks in 1918 on a pretext of embezzling nationalised church property and executed in 1919. It became a public museum in 1923; services continued until its full secularisation in 1929 under the Soviet Union's antireligious campaigns, and it has been part of the State Historical Museum since 1928. In the early 1930s it stood in the way of Stalin's plans to remodel Red Square: struck from the heritage register in 1933, it was surveyed for demolition by the preservationist Pyotr Baranovsky, who was then arrested for objecting. By 1937 the planners agreed it should be spared.

Post-war restorers uncovered the cathedral's internal wooden frame while repairing the brickwork in 1954–1955, and dome roofing changed from tin to copper in the 1960s. The last full renovation, completed September 2008, reopened the sanctuary of St Alexander Svirsky. The cathedral has been part of the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990, remains federal property of Russia, and operates as a museum under the State Historical Museum; regular Orthodox services resumed in 1997.