Saint Basil's Cathedral, Moscow · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Everyone visits Red Square for Saint Basil's, that impossible bouquet of swirled and spiralled domes, no two alike, painted in sweet shop colours against the Moscow sky, and almost everyone is told the same gruesome little story about it. When Ivan the Terrible saw the finished cathedral in 1561, the tale goes, he was so struck by its beauty that he had the architect blinded, so that nothing so lovely could ever be built again. It is a wonderful, terrible story, and it is almost certainly untrue. For a start there may never have been two architects to blind. For centuries people spoke of a pair called Postnik and Barma, until historians realised those were probably two nicknames for one man, Postnik Yakovlev. And here is the part I love. Far from being blinded, Postnik went straight on working.

In the very next years he raised the great stone walls of the Kazan Kremlin and its cathedral, and then, in 1588, four full years after Ivan was safely dead, he came back and added a chapel to Saint Basil's itself, over the grave of the barefoot holy fool who gives the cathedral its name. A blinded man does not build for another thirty years. The legend seems to have crept in only in the 17th century, and got a fresh coat of paint from a Soviet poem in 1938. The guidebooks send you out to photograph the domes from the far side of the square. They rarely tell you that the man who supposedly lost his eyes for them kept his sight, and his chisel, for the rest of his life.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.