Kazan Cathedral
Small brick church with tiered kokoshniki roofs, rebuilt stone by stone from a banned architect's smuggled blueprints.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Kazan Cathedral in Moscow follows restoration expert Pyotr Baranovsky, banned from the city yet sneaking in daily in 1936, as he measures and draws a small brick church, standing since 1636, while Stalin's crews prepare to tear it down for Red Square's tank parades. You'll hear about the fight Baranovsky had already lost over Saint Basil's Cathedral next door, and the sixteen detailed blueprints he filled in the church's final weeks. Those drawings then sat forgotten in an archive for more than fifty years.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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