Izmailovo Kremlin

This guide to Izmailovo Kremlin in Moscow opens with a businessman's dream in the 1990s: his own fairy-tale kremlin of towers, a square, and a pond, pitched straight to the mayor's office. It follows Alexander Ushakov and his partner Marina Alekseeva as they raise the wooden complex from nothing between the late 1990s and 2003, painting its towers in the reds and blues of old Russian fables rather than the real Kremlin's brick. Then, in 2005, fire tears through the complex and the market beside it. The Church of Saint Nicholas, close to forty-six meters of timber, is the tallest wooden church in Russia.