Ivan IV the Terrible is buried in this cathedral, although visitors can not see the tombstone - it is in the side-chapel. The Archangel Cathedral is located on the Cathedral Square of the Moscow Kremlin.

In the 13th century there was a wooden church in the name of Archangel Michael . Under Ivan Kalita in 1333 a new white-stone temple was built . One of the legends says: in that summer rye was not born, and as a token of gratitude for ridding Rus of famine, a temple was built . According to another version, the cathedral was "grateful" for getting rid of the plague . At that time the Archangel was the largest in the Kremlin - 20 meters in height . By the beginning of the 16th century the church had decayed . Then under the leadership of the Italian architect Aleviz Novy in 1505-1508, a new . building is being built on the site of the old church, which has been restored many times in several centuries, and we see now .

Until Peter I The Archangel Cathedral served as the family burial vault of the Russian church. The first on its territory was buried Ivan Kalita, who laid the temple. Vasilii III, his grandfather, father and grandson-Tsarevich Dmitri, rest at the altar wall near the south wall. In the 1660s Ivan IV built a new chapel for the royal tomb. He was buried here, as was Fyodor Ivanovich. There are 54 graves in the church. Most of the burials are under the floor slabs, in the 17th century gravestones with ornaments appeared over them.

The cathedral is made in the traditional Russian style - from brick with white stone details. But in its architecture can be traced and elements of the Venetian style. The processing uses the motifs of the Italian Renaissance architecture. At the device of the internal space Aleviz New introduced for the first time the interior decoration of the temple. In the middle of the 16th century, on the eastern side, a single-domed church of the Intercession of the Virgin was annexed. Later the chapel in honor of the John the Forerunner's acquisition was built symmetrically.