Borovitsky Gate of the Kremlin. Borovitskaya tower of the Moscow Kremlin Height of the Borovitskaya tower of the Kremlin

Helmeted Tower The main market is famous for many monumental buildings, but perhaps the most original of those presented on it is the Town Hall Tower, standing alone in the north-eastern part of the square. Once upon a time, the Krakow Town Hall was located in a corner of a dense

Nikolskaya Tower Behind the Senate Tower, on the northern side of Red Square, stands the Nikolskaya Tower. Pietro Antonio Solari built it simultaneously with Spasskaya, in 1491. An icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker was fixed above the passage gate of its diversion arch. By this

Trinity Tower, Trinity Bridge and Kutafya Tower And now let's turn our attention to the Trinity Tower of the Kremlin - more precisely, to the architectural ensemble of which it is the main part. Let's start with the tower itself. Over its history, it has changed several names - Epiphany,

Tower Towers (Fig. 3) were multi-storey defensive buildings of great strength (the thickness of their walls at the bottom was 4-6 m) and height (up to 1.5 times higher than the walls), with an open platform at the top, crowned with a crenellated parapet. The floors communicated with each other by extensions

The Kremlin once arose at the very base of Borovitsky Hill. This is where the tower now stands, built in 1490 by Peter Antonio Solario. Before this, there was an old exit from the Kremlin and the closest approach from the fortress wall to the river.

In just one summer, a white-stone Kremlin rose on Borovitsky Hill, on the site of which, a hundred years later, construction began on the very walls that can be seen today in modern Moscow.

The Kremlin's Borovitskaya Tower, once considered the "back gate", is today the main route through which the president usually enters the Kremlin. If the flag of any state flies on the building at the Borovitsky Gate, this indicates that its president is here.

Kremlin towers

All the towers and walls that currently exist in the Kremlin were built from 1485 to 1495 on the site where the dilapidated old white stone walls, built by Dmitry Donskoy, stood.

In those days, they were powerful fortifications, designed taking into account the latest achievements of military technology of the 15th century at that time. Now the towers and walls of the Kremlin, first of all, represent an invaluable architectural and historical monument of the Russian state.

All the towers are connected to each other by fairly high walls, forming an irregular triangle around the perimeter. The entire territory covers an area of ​​28 hectares. When designing, the architects took into account that soldiers from the fortress walls could fire not only at the part of the terrain that opens to their eyes, but also so that they could control the situation along the Kremlin walls. In this regard, the towers protrude slightly beyond the line of the walls.

In those days, the towers were topped with wooden tents, on which watchtowers were built. Some of them had bells (alarms or flashes). Watchmen called them during threats of real danger to the Kremlin.

In addition, clocks were installed on the towers of the main towers (Troitskaya and Spasskaya). They are now on the Borovitskaya Tower.

Location of Borovitskaya Tower, surrounding area

The tower is located in the southwestern part of the Moscow Kremlin. The tower itself, which offers an amazing view of the Stone Bridge, is clearly visible from the famous Alexander Garden.

Next to it is the most famous museum - the Armory Chamber. Its building was built in 1547 and was previously called the Great Treasury. The Diamond Fund located inside contains a variety of precious stones and unique metals of great historical value.

The tower is located near the Moscow metro station of the same name, the distance to which is approximately 450 meters.

One interesting fact should be noted. During the construction of the metro, a house in perfect condition was found on this site. The brick structure, built in the 16th century, is well preserved with its interior utensils and furniture. It turned out to be underground after the ground collapsed.

Borovitskaya Tower: photo, description

Without the star, the height of the tower is 50.7 meters (the star is 2.3 meters). The building was designed by Italian architect Pietro Antonio Solari in 1490. These were the times of the reign of Vasily III.

It is believed that this tower has a twin sister - the famous tower of Queen Syuyumbike, located in the Kazan Kremlin.

Unlike the other 2 towers, Borovitskaya was used only for household needs, for travel to the Konyushenny and Zhitny courtyards, located on the site of the Tainitsky Garden.

The Borovitsky Gate in the Kremlin Palace is the oldest. To this day, they still contain images of coats of arms, the origin of which has not yet been established.

Narrow openings can be seen above the gate. Previously, they housed the chains of the drawbridge spanning the Neglinka.

Interior furnishings

The Borovitskaya Tower of the Moscow Kremlin has only 5 tiers, interconnected by a system of stairs, which are built into the eastern and northern walls.

The main quadrangle is covered with cylindrical vaults. The second, which has formwork for windows, is covered with a closed vault. The other two quadrangles, the octagon and the tent are connected into one room.

From the first tier there is a passage to the basement, which is partially filled up. The second tier has the remains of decorative elements of the former church.

About the name

The Borovitskaya Tower got its name from the hill of the same name, which, in turn, was named after the forest (dense forest) that covered the entire Kremlin hill.

This name did not change even after the tsar’s decree (XVII century) to rename it to Predtechenskaya due to its location near the temple built in honor of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist.

There is one legend that the tower got its name due to the fact that the white-stone Kremlin was built by the residents of Borovsk under Dmitry Donskoy.

Something from history

The Borovitskaya Tower of the Moscow Kremlin is the ninth. Its construction in 1490 was carried out by Pyotr Fryazin. Chronicles say that the structure that was previously located on this site was called the same.

A long time ago, an icon of St. was placed above the Borovitsky gate. John the Baptist, but during the Soviet times it disappeared. Today there is a clock in this place.

The Borovitskaya Tower, like many Kremlin buildings, was blown up in 1812 during the retreat of French troops. However, it was soon restored by Osip Bove.

Until the 1820s, near the tower itself there was a bridge connecting the banks of the Neglinka. It was dismantled during the construction and improvement of the Alexander Garden, and the river was enclosed in a pipe.

There is one amazing secret of the city of Moscow, connected specifically with the Borovitskaya Tower. This is the library of I. the Terrible - the mythical Liberia, once located inside the Kremlin. It is mentioned in many chronicles, as well as in the stories of numerous travelers. Presumably the library was kept in the Annunciation Cathedral (in the basement) among numerous treasures. And yet, to date, there were no precious volumes there. Maybe it is hidden in an unknown secret dungeon. It’s not just that there are rumors about some kind of secret passage located under the building. The Borovitskaya Tower is fraught with many mysteries.

More on the Liberian Mystery

It began at the end of the 15th century, when Sophia Palaeologus (Princess of Byzantium), as a dowry to her husband Ivan III, brought many works of Byzantine and ancient Greek scientists and philosophers (Zarathustra, Aristotle, Cicero), papyri books saved during a fire in Library A Macedonian.

Having no less passion for books (his love for precious stones is also known), Ivan IV continued to collect this library. He valued Liberia very much, so he ordered the specialist in dungeons and hiding places, Feorovanti (Italian), to create underground catacombs in the Kremlin. He served his service so responsibly that a legend arose according to which the library of Ivan the Terrible should not be discovered for 8 centuries.

Conclusion

The Borovitskaya Tower is the most likely hiding place. There is another version that the library is not a fiction. One of the boyars locked in the Kremlin during the Polish intervention said that all the books were lost due to terrible hunger during the long siege. Then the boyars ate all living things (birds, dogs and cats), and also consumed parchments found in one of the basements with sheep fat.

The search for I. the Terrible's library continues to this day.

Address: Moscow Kremlin, between the Vodovzvodnaya and Armory towers
Date of construction: 1490
Tower height: with a star 54.05 m.
There is a ruby ​​star on the tower
Coordinates: 55°44"56.2"N 37°36"45.7"E

The Borovitskaya Tower belongs to the southwestern towers adorning the wall of the Moscow Kremlin. The building is located next to three other attractions - the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge, a square called Borovitskaya and the Alexander Garden.

According to legend, the tower owes its name to the ancient forest that once covered the hill on which Moscow was built. But there is another version, which indicates that the tower received the name “Borovitskaya” from the Kremlin builders who lived in the city of Borovsk.

View of the tower from the street. Borovitskaya

The Borovitskaya Tower adorned Moscow in 1490, and the work on its construction was supervised by an Italian architect named Solari, who arrived in the capital Russian city on the instructions of Vasily III. In the same year, the architect erected a wall connecting the Borovitskaya and Vodovzvodnaya (Sviblova) towers.

In 1658, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich decided to rename the tower Predtechenskaya, since the Church of the Nativity of the Baptist was located on the territory of the Moscow Kremlin. Subsequently, the shrine was dismantled in preparation for the construction of the Armory, and the new name of the tower did not take root.

According to some historical data, before the construction of the modern structure of the Borovitskaya Tower, its place was occupied by another building with the same name. This fact became known from the 1461 record of the construction of the Church of St. John the Baptist “on the forest.” The same historical document also proves the fact that the church is located next to the “Boroviat Gate”.

View of the Borovitsky Gate

For a long time, the icon of John the Baptist served as decoration for the Borovitsky Gate. The fire in the lamp was maintained by the servants of the Streletsky Church, located on Borovitskaya Square. Unfortunately, in 1932, the temple building was destroyed during the planning of work related to the construction of the Sokolnicheskaya metro line, and the icon of the saint was simply lost during the years of Soviet power. Now the clock takes its place.

By decision of the Soviet government, the Borovitskaya tower was crowned with a 5-pointed star, the span of its rays is 3.2 m, and the star itself is 3.35 m in height. These changes in the appearance of the tower occurred in 1935 of the last century - before that it served as its crown royal double-headed eagle. A couple of years later, the star was replaced with a new one, which still serves as a decoration for one of the most beautiful towers in Moscow. And the Borovitsky Gate remained a functioning travel gate, which cannot be said about other gates of the Moscow Kremlin.

Features of the architecture of the Borovitskaya Tower

Initially, the basis of the Borovitskaya tower was a quadrangle, “topped” with a wooden tent. From 1666 to 1680, work was carried out to improve the structure.

From left to right: Armory Tower, Borovitskaya Tower

As a result, the wooden tent disappeared, and on the main quadrangle, one after another, three more quadrangles appeared, decreasing upward. The whole structure was complemented by a quadrangle-octahedron and a tent made of stone. Thanks to the implementation of such an interesting architectural solution, the Borovitskaya Tower received a stepped shape reminiscent of a pyramid. Also, on the side of the tower, the craftsmen erected a diversion arch and added a passage gate with an iron grating. A drawbridge was built across the Neglinnaya River, which flows next to the Moscow Kremlin.

After some time, the tower underwent reconstruction and was decorated with white stone elements in a pseudo-Gothic style. Subsequently, the invasion of the French army, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, led to the fact that the best architectural monuments of the capital city were either damaged or completely destroyed due to numerous explosions or fires. The result of one of these explosions was the fall of a tent from the top of the Borovitskaya tower.

View of the tower from the Kremlin territory

However, from 1816 to 1819, both Borovitskaya and all other damaged towers were repaired (all work was supervised by the architect O.I. Bove). Historians believe that as work was completed, a clock was added to the tower’s structure.. How reliable this fact is is unknown, since the opinion of historians is based only on drawings depicting gates and clocks that have been preserved from ancient times.

Somewhat later, already in 1848, the Church of the Nativity of the Baptist was destroyed, and the Borovitskaya Tower was turned into one of the churches of Russia, equipped with an altar, but destroying the pseudo-Gothic decorations. Most of the decorative elements suffered a similar fate - they were simply destroyed in 1860 during planned repairs. But in the 1970s, the white stone decorations were restored, and a shield with the coat of arms of Moscow was hung above the gate.

The internal layout of the Borovitskaya Tower is designed as follows: in the main 16.68-meter quadrangle there are two tiers covered with cylinder vaults. The first tier leads to a partially filled basement, and the second serves as a storage area for the remains of the decoration of an ancient church from the 19th century.

The other, 4.16-meter quadrangle is represented by a room with window formwork and a closed vault.

View of the tower from the Vodovzvodnaya Tower

The last two quadrangles, the size of which were 3.47 and 4.16 meters respectively, were united by the builders with a closed vault, turning them into a single room, and provided formwork for the windows. The craftsmen combined an 18.07-meter tent with a 4.16-meter octagon, and narrow but long windows (rumors) were cut into all the walls.

To move between tiers, the northern and eastern sides of the Borovitskaya tower were equipped with stairs, and in the southeastern corner of the structure a spiral staircase was installed, passing completely through the room of the main quadrangle from the basement equipped in it to the next quadrangle.

Design of the tower arch, gate and drawbridge

The triangular-shaped outlet arrow is connected to the basement located in the main quadrangle. Above the passage gates there are narrow holes through which chains were previously passed to raise the bridge over the Neglinka River. If you look closely at the gate passage, you will also notice the vertical grooves necessary for the lowering grille. According to history experts, the Borovitsky Gate is the oldest of all the gates of the Moscow Kremlin.

If you approach them from the outside of the Kremlin, on the folds of the gate you can see the coats of arms made of white stone - Moscow and Lithuania. Historians still do not give an exact answer to the question of when and why they appeared. Be that as it may, the two coats of arms became the decoration of the outlet arch, which harmoniously complemented the Borovitskaya Tower in its time. Of course, the coats of arms could have been taken from another ancient structure that was undergoing reconstruction in the same years. But they appeared on the Borovitskaya Tower for a reason, because the coats of arms carry a certain dialectical meaning, conveying a message to descendants from the depths of antiquity.

As for the design of the drawbridge, it was made of stone and resembled an arch in shape. In 1510, the bed of the Neglinnaya River, characterized by swampy and marshy banks, was straightened and brought closer to the wall of the Moscow Kremlin. And they did it, breaking through the Borovitskaya Tower - Vodovzvodnaya Tower - Moscow River channel. Thus, a certain section of the Kremlin became more protected militarily, and the construction of a drawbridge became a necessity. The lifting mechanism itself was located on the 2nd tier of the Borovitskaya tower.

The Moscow Streltsy Museum “Streltsy Chambers” opened in 2014 in the building of the Titov Chambers, an architectural monument of the 17th-18th centuries, whose interiors and facade have retained their historical appearance to this day. The first owner of the chambers was the Duma clerk of the Discharge Order, close to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich Semyon Stepanovich Titov, in whose honor the building received its name. However, his family owned the house only until the middle of the 18th century; later, the owners of the building constantly changed, and in the 1930-1940s, communal apartments were located here, in which people who worked as service personnel in the House of Writers, built nearby a little earlier, settled. In 2014, exhibition halls opened in the building of the chambers, and already in November 2015, the military history museum of the Russian Military Historical Society “Streltsy Chambers” opened here.

The rightful owners of the Streletsky Chambers are the Streltsy, to whom the main exhibition of the museum is dedicated. Multimedia exhibitions “Moscow Archers” and “Servant People of the Moscow State” tell the story of the first regular army of Rus' and the development of the domestic armed forces in the 17th century. The exhibitions feature weapons, rare archival documents, large-scale installations and models, reconstructions of uniforms, complemented by artistic paintings and multimedia panoramas. Everyone will be able to feel like a real archer, loading a musket, mastering playing the drum or writing according to ancient Russian canons. Also in the “Streltsy Chambers” there are exhibitions on military-historical topics, regular events: meetings, scientific lectures, creative evenings, holidays and cultural marathons, such as “Night at the Museum”, “Library Night” and “Night of the Arts”.