Day 114 (20th October) Moscow – David Jenny Travel

We went to Red Square again, this time getting out at Teatralnaya Station which serves the Bolshoi Theatre. We bought a card which can be used on buses and the metro, but it can apparently be used only by one person so when we reached Kuznetskii Most on the purple line and transferred to the red line to go to Teatralnyi, the card didn’t work for me. So the station official waited until someone else went through and pushed me through after them.

On reaching Red Square, Jennifer wanted to look at the shops, specifically GUM (Great Universal Store) which is basically a huge mall selling everything from smart Western European clothes to Russian preserves such as mushrooms and gherkins as well as caviar in the Gastronom No.1 shop.

We then decided that, in spite of the exorbitant entry charge, we would go to Saint Basil’s Cathedral. The first (wooden) cathedral was built by Ivan the Terrible in 1554 over the bones of Saint Basil the Blessed who walked round Moscow in 20 degrees of frost dressed only in a loincloth. In 1555 he built a cathedral on the same spot to mark his military victories and capture of Kazan and Astrakhan from the Tatars. It was nice to hear the “Doros Ensemble” singing Russian religious songs; we saw them in 2018 when there were four of them (only two today) and the music was beautiful. The walls were covered in the most beautiful frescoes and icons.

The cathedral is also called the “Cathedral of the Protecting Veil of the Most Holy Mother of God on the Moat” and has a glorious icon called ”Our Lady of the Sign” on the outside of the western wall. The highest spire is called “Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God” and commemorates the beginning of the battle for Kazan in 1552. The northern spire commemorates 4^th century martyrs, Saints Cyprian and Justina, and has an onion dome of blue and white stripes. It also commemorates the battle for Kazan. The north-eastern spire with the blue and purple striped onion dome commemorates the Three Constantinople Patriarchs, Saints Alexander, John and Paul who lived between the 4^th and 8^th centuries. It was bult to mark the defeat of the Crimean Tatar cavalry at Kazan. The spire with the white and green striped spire, sitting in front of the much larger white and green spire of the Holy Trinity, commemorates St.Alexander Svirskii (died in 1533) and marks the defeat of the Tatar cavalry at Kazan.

An important feature of Red Square is the circular stone platform Lobnoye Mesto from which decrees and death sentences were announced. The place of execution was behind St Basils. We didn’t see Lenin’s mausoleum as there was a long queue and we saw it in 2018 as well as the Kremlin wall where many Russian civic and military figures are buried including Stalin.

We then went to the Kremlin and visited the Archangel Cathedral (which is the necropolis for all the princes and tsars of Russia between 1340 and 1730. We also visited the Annunciation Cathedral, built in 1484. Ivan the Terrible added 4 small side chapels, each with a single dome, but was not allowed inside the Cathedral after he married for the 4th time (the Church allowed a maximum of 3). A new porch was built to allow him to stand during services.