The Moscow architect who kept his eyes

Here is the Saint Basil's detail I love, and almost everyone gets it wrong because the wrong version is so much more dramatic. Everyone knows the story: Ivan the Terrible saw the finished cathedral, decided nothing so beautiful must ever be built again, and had the architect blinded on the spot.

It is a brilliant story and almost none of it holds up. There may not even have been two architects to blind. For years people named a pair, Postnik and Barma, before historians worked out those were most likely two nicknames for the same man, Postnik Yakovlev. And he certainly kept his sight, because he kept building. In the next couple of years he put up the great stone walls of the Kazan Kremlin, and then in 1588, four years after Ivan himself had died, he came back to add a whole new chapel to Saint Basil's, above the grave of the barefoot holy fool the cathedral is named for. The blinding tale only really surfaces in the 17th century, and a Soviet poet gave it a fresh lease of life in 1938.

I painted the cathedral in watercolour and ink, every dome its own colour and its own twist, and the whole time I kept thinking about a man dogged for centuries by a cruelty that never happened to him, quietly working away with both eyes open. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here:  Saint Basil's Cathedral, Moscow · Travel Poster