The Name and the Cult

How a hidden holy fool’s name became the popular title of Moscow’s most famous building. “St. Basil’s Cathedral” is a folk misnaming of the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Theotokos on the Moat; the name came from the chapel built in 1588 over Basil’s grave, and the popular attachment to the saint gradually overwrote the church’s true dedication in common speech.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified 1588; feast 2 August O.S. / 15 August N.S.)

Two Names, One Church

Almost everyone who can picture the ring of coloured onion domes on Red Square calls the building “St. Basil’s Cathedral.” Almost no one who uses the name knows the man, and the name itself is, strictly, a mistake — a folk substitution that has all but replaced the church’s real dedication. The building is the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat (Russian Pokrovsky sobor, Sobor Pokrova Presvyatoy Bogoroditsy chto na Rvu), raised by Ivan IV in 1555–61 to give thanks for the capture of Kazan (Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture, Cambridge University Press, 1993, ch. 4, on the Intercession Cathedral; PE, vol. 7, “Василий Блаженный,” pravenc.ru/text/150789.html). Its popular name, Khram Vasiliya Blazhennogo — “the Church of Basil the Blessed” — is secondary, devotional, and, in the Russian phrase, narodnoe: the name the people gave it, not the name it was consecrated under. Understanding how the second name overwrote the first is the key to Basil’s peculiar fame.

“Vasily Blazhenny”

In Russian the saint is Vasily Blazhenny — Basil the Blessed — and sometimes Vasily Nagoy, “Basil the Naked,” from the nakedness that was his ascetic sign (PE, vol. 7). Blazhenny, “the blessed,” is the epithet the Slavonic tradition attaches especially to the fools-for-Christ; it is the same word borne by blazhennaya Kseniya, St. Xenia of Petersburg, and it marks a holiness lived outside the monastery and outside ordinary social order (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, 1966; Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, 2006; see St. Xenia of St. Petersburg). To Muscovites of the sixteenth century, “Vasily Blazhenny” named not a building but a man they had seen in the markets — the naked, chained wonderworker whose grave, once he died, became a place of pilgrimage. The migration of that name to the cathedral is the migration of a cult.

The Chapel That Gave the Name

Basil died in the 1550s and was buried by the church of the Holy Trinity “on the Moat” — the parish at the site where the great Intercession Cathedral was being, or had just been, built on Red Square (PE, vol. 7; Brumfield, 1993). His grave there at once drew veneration. In 1588, at his glorification under Tsar Feodor Ioannovich, a chapel was raised over the grave and attached to the northeast corner of the cathedral to house his relics — a tenth chapel added to the nine that made up the original church (PE, vol. 7; Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture, 1993, on the 1588 addition). This chapel, dedicated to St. Basil, is the hinge of the whole naming story: it was the one part of the great complex that ordinary Muscovites entered most, prayed at most, and named for its saint. Because the Basil chapel was where the miracle-working relics lay — and because, unlike the upper church, it was heated and open through the year for regular services — it became in popular use the identity of the whole building (Brumfield, 1993; PE, vol. 7, on the chapel and the relics). The people came to “Vasily Blazhenny,” and the name of the chapel became the name of the cathedral.

How a Misname Wins

The overwriting was gradual and never official. In the Church’s own usage the building has always been the Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat; the feast of its dedication is the Protection (Pokrov) of the Theotokos on 1 October (Brumfield, 1993; PE, vol. 7). But in the mouths of Muscovites, and then of all Russia and the world, the saint won. Several forces pushed in the same direction. The dedication of the mother-church — the Intercession — was abstract and shared with countless other churches; the saint in the corner chapel was singular, local, and a wonderworker with relics one could venerate. The Basil chapel’s year-round life made it the point of daily contact with the building. And the persona of the holy fool — naked, fearless, a rebuker of the great — gripped the popular imagination as a theological abstraction could not. By the time the cathedral was famous across Europe, it was famous under the fool’s name (Brumfield, 1993, on the popular naming; Flier, “Church of the Intercession” studies, on the cathedral’s symbolic program). The full history of the building and its dedication is given in The Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat.

The Cult Before, Beneath, and After the Name

The naming is more than a curiosity; it is a compressed history of the cult itself. Basil’s veneration ran ahead of his official glorification — the grave was a pilgrimage site in the years between his death and 1588 — and it outran the cathedral’s own dedication in common speech, so that a folk cult reshaped how the whole nation names one of its central monuments (PE, vol. 7; Kizenko, on lay-driven cult formation in Russia, cf. her work cited in the St. Xenia collection). This is the same “cult from below” pattern the Xenia case documents two centuries later: veneration precedes and outweighs the official act, and the people’s devotion, not the hierarchy’s category, fixes the name that sticks. In Basil’s case the pattern is written into the map of Moscow, where the church of the Intercession answers, for almost everyone, to the name of a naked fool.

That the misname has never troubled the Church is itself telling. The Cathedral of the Intercession remains, in liturgy and in law, dedicated to the Theotokos; the popular name honours the saint whose relics it holds. Both are true, and the coexistence of the two names is a small monument to how yurodstvo works — the fool, who spent his life refusing every ordinary place, ends by displacing even the name of a cathedral, and does so from a corner chapel, without ever having sought it.

See Also

• Who Was Basil the Blessed — the man behind the name
• The Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat — the true dedication and building history
• The Chapel and the Relics — the 1588 chapel that carried the name
• Basil in Art and National Memory — the cathedral as national symbol
• St. Xenia of St. Petersburg — the sibling case of a cult “from below”

References

• Erusalimsky, K. Yu., and A. S. Preobrazhensky. “Василий Блаженный.” In Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, vol. 7, 123–131. Moscow, 2004. pravenc.ru/text/150789.html. (The names “Vasily Blazhenny” / “Vasily Nagoy”; the 1588 chapel and relics; the cathedral’s dedication.)
• Brumfield, William Craft. A History of Russian Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, ch. 4. (The Intercession Cathedral of 1555–61; the 1588 Basil chapel; the popular naming.)
• Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, The Middle Ages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (The epithet blazhenny and the fools-for-Christ.)
• Ivanov, Sergey A. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Trans. Simon Franklin. Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Flier, Michael S. Studies on the Intercession Cathedral and the symbolic program of Red Square (the “New Jerusalem” reading). Cited for the cathedral’s symbolic role.