Saint Basil’s Cathedral is kind of like the movie The Prince of Egypt: You don’t even have to be religious to be enamored with it.
If you show just about anyone a picture of Saint Baz’s, they will recognize it. They may not know its name, or even that it’s in Russia, but they’ll have seen it before. The bright colors and the massive onion domes sort of etch themselves into your memory. But there are two things that most of these people probably won’t know:
- that Saint Basil’s is probably about one-quarter the size you think it is, and
- that the inside is just as amazing as the outside.
I don’t have nearly as many pictures of the inside of this cathedral as I would like. The day we went there, the daytime high was -4 F (-20 C), and batteries don’t work terribly well at those temperatures. The cathedral was just warm enough inside that you couldn’t see your breath in most rooms, but the damage was done. I could have my camera out and turned on for maybe seven seconds–just long enough to aim, focus, and capture–before the cold would drain the batteries and the camera would shut itself off.
The first floor of Saint Basil’s was kind of a history museum. There were all sorts of relics and old paintings. Preserved sections of wall and roofing. Artifacts found during renovations. An absolutely stunning shrine over the remains of Saint Basil the Blessed himself.
The rest of the cathedral was filled, floor to vaulted ceiling, with religious icons.
Russian Orthodox Christians are huge into religious icons. They will paint the likenesses of saints and holy figures, then cover the painting in gold or silver filigree, inlay jewels and pearls, sometimes even make jewelry for the person in the portrait to “wear.” (I saw some of this another day, at the Tretyakov Art Gallery.) The murals at Saint Baz’s were framed in gold, decorated with gold leaf… It was absolutely breathtaking.
As someone was once very, very religious and who now has a somewhat more analytic (but not an overly critical) view of religion, it was an experience well worth waiting an hour in sub-zero temperatures for. To be able to see the devotion, the love, the… the… fuck, I can’t even express it in words, and I have a bachelor’s degree in expressing things in words.
But to walk through this cathedral, to see the murals and the icons, the metalwork, the architecture, and to realize that people made all of it to venerate and praise something they had never actually seen or physically touched and had no actual concrete proof of the existence of… that says so much about the human experience. That speaks absolute volumes about us. And I think it’s beautiful. Really, really beautiful.
In one of the rooms, there was a quartet of men singing hymns, and the architecture was so perfectly devised that their voices made the whole cathedral vibrate. I was able to make a few recordings with my camera, and I’ll be posting those as well.
I had a hard time leaving St. Basil’s, because it’s not clear if I’ll ever be able to go back to it. But I was there. And it was amazing.