Kolomenskoye

This guide to Kolomenskoye in Moscow opens around 1530, with Grand Prince Vasily the Third facing a dynastic crisis with no male heir, and workers raising a soaring white tower here as a prayer turned into architecture. You'll hear how the building's meaning changed mid-construction after an event nobody could have planned for, and what made its tent-shaped roof so daring that historians credit an Italian engineer with solving how the stone could stand. Look up at the walls, nearly three meters thick, bound in iron to keep the tower from splitting apart.