Postcard Greetings From Kolomenskoye

The Church of the Ascension, was built on a tsarist estate (Kolomenskoye) near Moscow in 1532 (very much within Moscow’s borders today) to commemorate the birth of the prince that would come to be known as Ivan the Terrible. It may command the attention of the casual visitor today, but was revolutionary at the time: this was the first tent-roofed ecclesiastical structure in stone built in Russia and it had an enormous impact on Orthodox architecture going forward, becoming something akin to a national style. This church, with its one dome, represented an enormous break with the standard church style of having five domes on four pillars. The walls are several meters thick, but the tall ceilings give the cathedral an air of spaciousness - Moscow, Russia