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Article: St. Basil's Cathedral; Ivan the Terrible's wonderful fantasy.(World)
- Article from:
- The Christian Science Monitor
- Article date:
- July 28, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 The Christian Science Publishing Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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If you did not know that St. Basil's Cathedral stood at one end of Moscow's Red Square, and were asked to guess the nature of the building, you could be forgiven for thinking it a fabulist's invention.
Nowhere does Russian church architecture flower into such mad fantasy.
Nowhere does a cathedral challenge you with such daring to find it absurd, and then force you to conclude that it is simply magnificent.
Each of its nine multi-hued onion domes is a different size, a different shape, a different height from every other.
One green and yellow candy-twisted cupola resembles an extravagant oriental potentate's turban. Another, spiked with ...