Russian Architecture

Russian architecture, in its traditional ecclesiastical form, developed from Byzantine models transmitted through Kievan Rus' after its Christianization in the late tenth century, and evolved through the Muscovite period into a building idiom with clear visual features of its own. Its single most recognizable feature is the onion dome, a bulbous dome that swells outward before tapering to a narrow point, a shape whose steep sides are often explained partly as a practical response to Russia's heavy snowfall, letting snow slide off rather than accumulate and collapse a flatter roof. Traditional Russian church builders also developed the tented roof, or shatyor, a tall pyramidal or tent shaped spire built over a square or polygonal base, used both in wooden village churches and later translated into masonry construction. These features reach their most famous combination in Saint Basil's Cathedral on Red Square in Moscow, commissioned by Ivan the Terrible and completed in 1561 to commemorate the Russian capture of Kazan, its cluster of individually patterned, brightly colored onion domed towers arranged around a tall central tented spire remaining the style's best known single image.