St. Basil’s Cathedral

St. Basil’s Cathedral：

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Commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in the mid-16th century, St. Basil’s Cathedral was erected to commemorate a Russian victory over the Tartar Mongols in 1552. The cathedral has nine chapels, each topped with an iconic onion dome.

st. basil’s cathedral facts

Moscow’s St. Basil’s Cathedral is seen through the heavy smog covering Moscow, Russia, early Friday, Aug. 6, 2010, as tourists walk through. Temperatures up to 100 F have exacerbated forest and peat bog fires across Russia’s central and western regions, destroying close to 2,000 homes. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
Amelie" has become something of a cultural phenomenon in its native France, where it went on to break box-office records before picking up a Cesar for best picture. It also goes up for five Oscars this month. Awards usually don’t mean much except as a pat on the back; in this case, however, "Amelie" deserves all the recognition it gets. A charming Audrey Tautou plays the title character. Amelie leads a sheltered life. The young woman works at a cafe and seems content to let life pass her by.

st. basil’s cathedral moscow russia

Then one day she finds a box hidden in her bathroom. Inside are useless mementos of a childhood, meaningless to all but their owner. Amelie decides to find the owner, return the box to him and hopefully make his life a bit more pleasant. When she eventually finds the man and returns his possessions to him, he and she experience an epiphany. Thus encouraged, our heroine sets out to change the lives of those around her. Her schemes vary from the trivial to the profound.
She sets up a coworker with a date. She inspires the artist next door. She helps her father learn to live again. But through it all, Amelie herself doesn’t have the courage to fall in love with Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), the man who could be her soul mate. Like Jane Austen’s Emma, Amelie can fix everyone’s life but her own. "Amelie" is a heartfelt plea for people to be nice to each other. What makes its characters genuine is their yearning to become something better than what they are .

st. basil’s cathedral history

St. Basil’s Cathedral is Moscow’s most famous and arguably the most beautiful ecclesiastical building.
● St. Basil’s Cathedral was built in the 1550′s by Ivan the Terrible to commemorate his victory over the Tartars in Kazan in Central Asia.
● Originally, it was white sided with gilded domes. The colorful patterns on the domes were not added until about a century after the cathedral was erected.
● It houses nine distinct chapels. Each has its own uniquely shaped, hued and patterned dome. Today, St. Basil’s Cathedral is a museum, no longer a place of worship.
● Legend has it that on completion of the church the Tzar ordered the architect, Postnik Yakovlev, to be blinded to prevent him from ever creating anything to rival its beauty again.
● Regrettably, the interior of St. Basil’s Cathedral badly deteriorated. Some say the decline began in 1812 when Napoleon’s cavalry lodged their horses within the cathedral. Others say it was the result of 20th century neglect. Fortunately, a project is currently afoot to restore St Basil’s interior.

st. basil’s cathedral model

Foundations, traditionally to medieval Moscow, were built of white stone, while the churches themselves were built of red brick (28×14×8 centimeters), then a relatively new material (the first attested brick building in Moscow, the new Kremlin Wall, was launched in 1485). Surveys of the structure showed that the basement level is perfectly aligned, indicating use of professional drawing and measurement, but each subsequent level becomes less and less regular. Restorators who replaced parts of the brickwork in 1954–1955 discovered that the massive brick walls conceal an internal wooden frame running the whole height of the church. This frame, made of elaborately tied thin studs, was erected as a life-size spatial model of the future cathedral and was gradually enclosed in solid masonry