Vladimir Manyuhin: Life after the Apocalypse: St Basil's Cathedral and Red Square, Moscow

Russian artist Vladimir Manyuhin takes photographs of modern-day cities around the world, then digitally manipulates them by adding digital decay and overgrowth to depict what they could look like after an apocalypse.

The Cathedral of the Protection of Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat, popularly known as Saint Basil's Cathedral, is a Russian Orthodox church erected on the Red Square in Moscow in 1555–61. In the 16th and 17th centuries the church, perceived as the earthly symbol of the Heavenly City, as happens to all churches in Byzantine Christianity, was popularly known as the "Jerusalem" and served as an allegory of the Jerusalem Temple in the annual Palm Sunday parade attended by the Patriarch of Moscow and the tsar. The building's design, shaped as a flame of a bonfire rising into the sky, has no analogues in Russian architecture: "It is like no other Russian building. Nothing similar can be found in the entire millennium of Byzantine tradition from the fifth to fifteenth century ... a strangeness that astonishes by its unexpectedness, complexity and dazzling interleaving of the manifold details of its design."

Before Apocalypse



After Apocalypse