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The cathedral was the home [[church]] of the Muscovite tsars, used as a private [[chapel]] for [[Marriage|weddings]] and [[baptism]]s. Most notable was its use for the wedding of Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, better known as Catherine the Great, to Grand Duke Peter. Its [[abbot]] remained a personal [[confessor]] of the royal family until the early twentieth century.

The cathedral is surrounded by parvises (porticos) on three sides. During the period 1562 to 1564, four single-cupola side chapels were built over the arched parvises. The north and west entrances from the parvise were decorated with whitestone portals in the sixteenth century. The fretwork is influenced by Italian Renaissance architecture. The bronze doors of the north and west portals are decorated with gold foil. The floor of the Cathedral of the Annunciation is made of jasper, which was brought from a cathedral in Rostov Velikiy in the sixteenth century. The walls contain fragments of murals that were painted by Theodosius and others during the second half of the sixteenth and the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The [[iconostasis]] includes [[icon]]s of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, including those painted by [[Andrei Rublev]], [[Theophan the Greek|Theophanes the Greek]], and Prokhor of Gorodets, as well others done in the nineteenth century.