St Basil's Cathedral - such stunning beauty

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We visited Moscow in August this year and one of the most beautiful places we visited was this cathedral. The full name of this building is the Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed and it was built in the time of Ivan The Terrible and rumour has it that the architect had his eyes burned out so that he couldn't build anything like it to make this less impressive. This is probably just a gory story as the name of the architect came up after this date as architect of similar churches in Russia At the time of the Revolution the Bolsheviks wanted to destroy this church and luckily this never happened.In Soviet times this, like all churches were taken over and this became a museum. It is still a museum today and has been part of the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990. It is a beautiful building which looks stunning in the day and at night when they light it up. This is actually group of churches not just one. It is shaped like flames from a bonfire. The building consists of a central church with eight side churches. The central church and four surrounding churches are octagonal in plan while the four diagonally placed churches are cuboid. The eight side churches have onion domes, while the central one has a low spire with smaller onion dome over it.The onion domes were added in the end of the 16th century. This was the building that I was most looking forward to seeing and it didn't disappoint in any way.