michael s. flier
ThemajorarchitecturalinnovationbeyondtheKremlinitselfwasthechurch
of the Intercession on the Moat, later known as St Basil’s cathedral. Built in
Beautiful (Red) Square in celebration of Ivan IV’s victory over the Kazan’
khanate in 1552, the church underwent a slow progression in 1555 from indi-
vidual shrines to a composite set of correlated chapels, which, taken together,
resemble Jerusalem in microcosm.
19
Completed in 1561 on a site adjacent to
the central marketplace and the world of the non-elite, the Intercession stood
as an antipode to the core structures of Cathedral Square behind the Kremlin
walls.
In 1598/9, just to the north of the Intercession, a raised round dais was built
in stone, possibly replacing an earlier wooden structure.
20
Called Golgotha
(Lobnoe mesto ‘place of the skull’), it was a site for major royal proclamations,
including declarations of war, announcements of royal births and deaths and
the naming of heirs apparent,perhaps replacing the original city tribune. It was
also used as a station for major cross processions led by the chief prelate and
the tsar, rituals featuring the palladium of Moscow, the icon of the Vladimir
Mother of God, in honour of her benevolent protection. Golgotha, by its
very name and placement near the Intercession ‘Jerusalem’, made manifest
Moscow’s self-perception as the New Jerusalem.
The political rituals that realised most directly the myth of the Muscovite
ruler and his realm were either contingent, prompted by circumstance, or cycli-
cal, governed by the ecclesiastical calendar. They were direct, requiring the
presence of the ruler, or indirect, referring to his office. In addition to the
actual protocols of ceremony, the locus of performance, whether inside or
outside Moscow and its golden centre, provided significant points of refer-
ence that guided and enriched the message intended. Nowhere is this better
demonstrated than in the etiquette involving foreign diplomats, from whom
we have quite extensive responses.
21
Viskovatyi Affair of 1553–54: Official Art, the Emergence of Autocracy, and the Disin-
tegration of Medieval Russian Culture’, RH 8 (1981): 298, 308, 314–20; Michael S. Flier,
‘K semioticheskomu analizu Zolotoi palaty Moskovskogo Kremlia’, in Drevnerusskoe
iskusstvo.Russkoeiskusstvopozdnegosrednevekov’ia:XVI vek(StPetersburg:Dmitrii Bulanin,
2003), pp. 180–6; Daniel Rowland, ‘Two Cultures, One Throneroom: Secular Courtiers
and Orthodox Culture in the Golden Hall of the Moscow Kremlin’, in Kivelson and
Greene (eds.), Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars,pp.40–53.
19 Michael S. Flier, ‘Filling in the Blanks: The Church of the Intercession and the Architec-
tonics of Medieval Muscovite Ritual’, HUS 19 (1995): 120–37; Savarenskaia (ed.), Arkhitek-
turnye ansambli Moskvy, pp. 54–99.
20 PSRL, vol. xxxiv (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1978), p. 202; B. A. Uspenskii, Tsar’ i patriarkh:
Kharizma vlasti v Rossii (Vizantiiskaia model’ i ee russkoe pereosmyslenie) (Moscow: Iazyki
russkoi kul’tury, 1998), p. 455 (n. 52).
21 Marshall Poe, ‘A People Born to Slavery’: Russia in Early Modern Ethnography, 1476–1748
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 39–81.
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