Sobor Uspeniya Presvyatoy Bogoroditsy Na Krutitsakh

This guide to the Krutitsy compound in Moscow opens with writer Alexander Herzen, once held inside these walls for a private toast the police decided was treason. It traces the nearly two thousand hand-glazed tiles crowning the gate tower to craftsman Stepan Ivanov's work in the 1690s, when Krutitsy was the showcase of Moscow's church leaders, then follows the compound's fall from grace as the state stripped it for the army and turned it into a barracks and prison. Listen for the fire that nearly finished the job, and for who talked a general out of tearing the cathedral down.