Notable voyager of 1497 / FRI 8-21-20 / landmark consecrated in 1561 / Imported European wheels / Suffering from desynchronosis

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (7-something) (all of the challenge was in that lower-middle section, under the so-called "dome")

THEME: sadly, yes— sigh ... I guess the black squares are supposed to represent a single ONION DOME, even though SAINT / BASIL'S CATHEDRAL in RED SQUARE has many such domes, and even though that black-square arrangement is a pretty poor approximation of an onion dome, frankly

Word of the Day: ERDOS (15A: Paul ___, pioneer in graph theory) —

Paul Erdős (Hungarian: Erdős Pál [ˈɛrdøːʃ ˈpaːl]; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a renowned Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. He was known both for his social practice of mathematics (he engaged more than 500 collaborators) and for his eccentric lifestyle (Time magazine called him The Oddball's Oddball). He devoted his waking hours to mathematics, even into his later years—indeed, his death came only hours after he solved a geometry problem at a conference in Warsaw. [...] Other idiosyncratic elements of Erdős's vocabulary include:

• Children were referred to as "epsilons" (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted by the Greek letter (ε)).
• Women were "bosses" who "captured" men as "slaves" by marrying them. Divorced men were "liberated". (wikipedia)

I'm never going to like themes on Friday or Saturday. Well, maybe not never, but you're gonna have to do way, way better than this random trivia test w/ terrible "picture." The theme stuff itself wasn't that hard to pick up, but because it was so cut off from the rest of the grid, the stuff under the "dome" was brutal for me—like a stand-alone puzzle that was way harder than any of the rest of it (probably because the other sections have easy-to-get theme material running through them, whereas there's zero theme material in the "dome" area). But back to the theme: don't care. You deprived me of the joy I get from the zippiest puzzle day of the week with this half-assed architectural nonsense. "Consecrated in 1561," Who Cares? It's not even a proper anniversary puzzle. We have ONION DOMEs all over town, as there are a lot of Eastern Orthodox churches around Binghamton. The black squares in this puzzle don't really capture the contours of the ONION DOME very well. I feel like some alien, or one of the Teletubbies, is looking at me when I look at this puzzle. Self-indulgent nonsense. Pass.