Here's the thing about St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, Russia: It looks like something you'd see at Disney World. It's colorful and whimsical and impractical — everything a life-size model of a fairytale building should be. But St. Basil's wasn't built in the 1970s out ofsteel-reinforced concrete like Cinderella's Castle — it was constructed almost 460 years ago out of a trendy new (at the time) material calledfired bricks, covering a timber frame. And it wasn't commissioned by an entertainment mogul, but by abona fideevil king, bent on world domination.
It looks great, though, doesn't it?
Advertisement
St. Basil's Cathedral was first commissioned in the mid-1550s by Ivan IV, orIvan the Terrible— the first tsar ofRussia— who was a really unlikable guy. He was reputed to be mentally unstable, domineering, paranoid and vengeful; rumor has it, he beat his pregnant daughter-in-law for dressing in a way he found inappropriate, and when her husband (Ivan's eldest son and heir) confronted his father after she miscarried as a result of the beating, Ivan the Terrible killed him.