Onion Dome - Traditional View

Traditional View

Russian icons painted before the Mongol invasion of Rus do not feature churches with onion domes. Two highly venerated pre-Mongol churches that have been rebuilt—the Assumption Cathedral and the Cathedral of St. Demetrius in Vladimir—uniquely display golden helmet domes. Restoration work on several other ancient churches revealed some fragments of former helmet-like domes below newer onion cupolas.

It has been posited that onion domes first appeared during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. The domes of Saint Basil's Cathedral have not been altered since the reign of Ivan's son Fyodor I, indicating the presence of onion domes in the sixteenth-century Russia.

Some scholars postulate that onion domes were borrowed by Russians from Muslim countries - probably from the Khanate of Kazan, whose conquest Ivan the Terrible commemorated by erecting St. Basil's Cathedral. Some believe that onion domes first appeared in Russian wooden architecture above tent-like churches. According to this theory, onion domes were strictly utilitarian, as they prevented snow from piling on the roof.

Based on the notion that onion domes did not exist in Russia before the mid-sixteenth century, restoration work on churches built before the seventeenth century have routinely involved replacement of onion domes with "more authentic" helmet-shaped domes. One example of such restoration is the Dormition Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin.