Have you ever created something so majestic that you were deliberately blinded afterwards to prevent you from recreating it anywhere else? No, us neither. But legend has it that after Saint Basil’s Cathedral was built in 1561, the person who designed and built it was blinded so that a structure of its beauty could never be built again. Considering the construction was ordered by the first Tsar of Russia, Ivan Vasilyevich (also known as Ivan the Terrible), this isn’t all too surprising.

Today, the colorful cathedral is one of the most popular cultural symbols of Russia, but those brilliant colours weren’t added for 200 years after it was built. In the 17th century, the domes were painted to resemble the Biblical description of the Kingdom of Heaven.