The Chapel and the Relics

The 1588 chapel raised over Basil’s grave at the northeast corner of the Intercession Cathedral, and the relics enshrined there in a silver reliquary. This tenth chapel — heated, open through the year, holding the wonder-working relics — became the point of daily contact between Muscovites and the great building, and so lent the whole cathedral the saint’s popular name.

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

The Chapel of 1588

When Basil was glorified in 1588, a chapel was built over his grave and attached to the northeast corner of the Cathedral of the Intercession to house his relics — the tenth chapel of the complex, and the only one added after the original 1555–61 construction (Erusalimsky, in Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya [PE], vol. 7, “Василий Блаженный,” Moscow, 2004, pravenc.ru/text/150789.html; Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture, Cambridge University Press, 1993, ch. 4). Its dedication was to St. Basil the Blessed himself. Unlike the eight campaign-chapels and the soaring central Intercession chapel, all part of the imperial thank-offering for Kazan, the Basil chapel grew directly out of the cult at the grave: it was built because the fool’s burial place had become a place of prayer and reported wonder (PE, vol. 7; on the cult before the canon see Death and Burial). It is, in a sense, the people’s chapel — added to a royal monument at the demand of popular veneration.

The Relics and the Silver Shrine

Over the grave the relics were enshrined with great richness. A silver shrine set with precious stones and pearls was made for the saint, and in 1589 Tsar Feodor Ioannovich and Tsarina Irina donated an ornate cover for it (PE, vol. 7). The lavishing of royal silver and pearls on the bones of a naked fool is a striking public act: the dynasty that had built the cathedral to celebrate its conquest now adorned, at its corner, the grave of a man who had owned nothing and rebuked its founder. The near-contemporary English envoy Giles Fletcher, in Moscow in 1588–89, noted that Basil’s body had lately been enshrined in the central Moscow church — an outside witness to the translation and honouring of the relics precisely at this time (Fletcher, Of the Russe Commonwealth, 1591, ed. Pipes and Fine, Harvard, 1966; PE, vol. 7, on Fletcher’s notice; see Canonization 1588). The relics remained a focus of Moscow pilgrimage through the centuries, and the chapel became one of the chief devotional sites of the capital.

Why This Corner Renamed the Cathedral

The Basil chapel is the physical cause of the cathedral’s popular renaming, and the reasons are concrete. First, it held the wonder-working relics: the point of the whole complex that a pilgrim came to, to venerate a saint and seek his intercession, was this corner (PE, vol. 7). Second, it was heated and open through the year, and used for regular services, where the upper Intercession church was cold and used chiefly on great feasts; so the Basil chapel was where ordinary Muscovites actually worshipped day by day, and the identity of a building is fixed by where its people gather (Brumfield, 1993, on the chapel’s year-round use and the popular naming). Third, the saint was singular and vivid — a local wonderworker with a face and a story — where the mother-church’s dedication, the Intercession, was abstract and shared with countless churches across Russia. The concrete, warm, relic-holding, saint-named chapel won over the abstract, cold, feast-named cathedral, and “Vasily Blazhenny” became the name of the whole (Brumfield, 1993; PE, vol. 7; the migration is treated from the saint’s side in The Name and the Cult).

A Second Fool in the Cathedral

The Basil chapel was not the cathedral’s only holy-fool grave. Later in the sixteenth century a second Moscow fool-for-Christ, Blessed John (Ioann) — “John the Hairy” or “Big Cap” (Bolshoy Kolpak), died 1589 — was also buried at the cathedral, and his relics too were venerated there; the two Moscow fools, Basil and John, were paired in the tradition and were published together in the classic study of their Lives (PE, vol. 7; Kuznetsov, Svyatye blazhennye Vasily i Ioann, Khrista radi yurodivye, Moskovskie chudotvortsy, Moscow, 1910 — the title itself pairs them). That the cathedral became a resting place for more than one holy fool underscores how firmly it had become associated, in the popular mind, with yurodstvo — the great imperial monument doubling as a shrine of the fools-for-Christ (on the other Moscow fools see Basil Among the Russian Fools).

The Architecture of the Addition

The 1588 chapel is architecturally distinct from the rest of the complex, and its distinctness tells the story of its origin. The original cathedral of 1555–61 is a vertical composition — eight tower-chapels around a soaring central tent, raised on a high base, its interiors small and its upper church reached by external stairs and galleries (Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture, Cambridge University Press, 1993, ch. 4). The Basil chapel, by contrast, was built low, at ground level on the northeast, over the grave and directly accessible — a functional, congregation-serving church rather than a soaring monument (Brumfield, 1993). This is why it, rather than the ceremonial upper church, became the place of ordinary worship: it was made to be entered and prayed in, not merely ascended to on great feasts. Later centuries added further chapels, galleries, and the tent-roofed bell tower, and successive restorations reworked the exterior colour and detail, but the Basil chapel has kept its ground-level, relic-centred character throughout — the working heart of a building whose upper stories are largely ceremonial (Brumfield, 1993, on the later additions and restorations). The very form of the addition, low and accessible where the rest soars and dazzles, embodies its purpose: the people’s chapel, built for the veneration of a saint, grafted onto an emperor’s thank-offering.

The Chapel Today

Through the Soviet period the cathedral as a whole was made a museum, and the relics and the life of the Basil chapel suffered the general suppression of the Church; in the post-Soviet era services have returned to the chapel, and the relics of St. Basil are again venerated there, the cathedral functioning as both museum and, in part, living church (Brumfield, 1993, on the museum status; PE, vol. 7). The corner chapel remains what it has been since 1588: the devotional heart of the building, the reason a cathedral dedicated to the Theotokos answers, for the whole world, to the name of a naked fool. It is a fitting outcome for a yurodivy — the man who refused every place ends by holding, without seeking it, the name of one of the most famous buildings on earth.

See Also

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 1588 chapel over the grave; the silver shrine and 1589 cover; Fletcher’s notice; the pairing with Blessed John; the relics.)
  • Brumfield, William Craft. A History of Russian Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, ch. 4. (The 1588 chapel at the northeast corner; its year-round use; the popular naming; the Soviet-era museum status.)
  • Fletcher, Giles. Of the Russe Commonwealth (1591). Ed. Pipes and Fine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (The body “lately” enshrined in the central Moscow church.)
  • Kuznetsov, Ioann I. Svyatye blazhennye Vasily i Ioann, Khrista radi yurodivye, Moskovskie chudotvortsy. Moscow, 1910. (The paired Lives of Basil and John, the Moscow fools of the cathedral.)