Located in the Red Square, the Pokrovsky Cathedral better known as St. Basil's Cathedral is a Russian Orthodox church.

The building is shaped as a flame of a bonfire rising into the sky, a design that has no analogues in Russian architecture.

The cathedral’s apparent anarchy of shapes hides a comprehensible plan of nine main chapels: the tall, tent-roofed one in the centre; four big, octagonal-towered ones, topped with the four biggest domes; and four smaller ones in between. Legend has it that Ivan had the architects blinded so they could never build anything comparable. This is a myth, however, as records show that they were employed a quarter of a century later (and four years after Ivan’s death) to add an additional chapel to the structure.

The cathedral foreshadowed the climax of Russian national architecture in the 17th century.