Kremlin, 2B, Nizhny Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod Region, Russia, 603001
Ivanovskaya Tower is the largest four-tiered gate tower of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin. It is located in the lower part of the hill between the Chasovaya and Belaya towers. The lower section of Ivanovsky Descent, formerly known as Bolshaya Mostovaya Street, passes through it. It is named after the Church of John the Baptist, located on its approaches, which has stood on the Nizhneposadsky Market since the 15th century. Another version states that the tower’s name immortalizes its founder — Tsar Ivan III, who began rebuilding the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin in stone in 1500. The tower acquired its modern appearance only in the 1950s, when restorers doubled its height.
According to one modern version, it was the first stone tower of the new Kremlin, laid down under the name Tverskaya in 1500 (although there are no documents naming it Tverskaya). The preference for the version that construction began with this tower is due to its defense of the most important part of the city with the trading settlement and piers. There is also a legend about the siege of the city in 1505 by the combined forces of the Kazan Tatars under Khan Muhammad-Amin and his brother-in-law — a mirza of the Nogai Horde. According to it, the death of the Nogai mirza from a shot fired from the Ivanovskaya Tower by a captive Lithuanian gunner caused the lifting of the siege.
Nizhny Novgorod had dangerous neighbors: the Kazan Khanate and the Nogai Horde. To resist Kazan’s pressure, it was necessary to strengthen Nizhny Novgorod and enhance its defenses. Since the mid-15th century, a large military garrison was permanently stationed here, and in 1500 the construction of a stone Kremlin began. However, construction proceeded slowly. By 1505, only the Ivanovskaya Tower had been built. It can be assumed that it was the completed Ivanovskaya Tower with the adjacent section of the wall that forced the many-thousand-strong Tatar army besieging the city in 1505 to retreat. The successful defense against a strong enemy became the basis for several legends, which undoubtedly reflected the people's confidence that the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin had become impregnable to enemies.
In the autumn of 1505, the combined forces of Kazan Khan Muhammad-Amin and his brother-in-law, leader of the Nogai Horde, about sixty thousand warriors, camped right under the Kremlin walls. The garrison commander, voivode Khabar Simsky, decided to use captive Lithuanians and captured cannons for the fortress defense. History preserves the name of Fedya Litvich, whose cannonball, fired from the Ivanovskaya Tower, hit the tent of the Nogai mirza and killed him, causing confusion and internal strife among the Tatars. This caused disorder in the enemy camp, and they withdrew from the city walls. In memory of this event, a Church of Elijah the Prophet, patron of thunder and lightning, and therefore of “fiery shooting,” was erected on the hill opposite the Kremlin.
In the autumn of 1506, Muhammad-Amin again attempted to capture the city, but once again the people of Nizhny Novgorod forced him to retreat.
Victories over the enemy were hard-won by the garrison warriors. The city needed a powerful new fortress.
The tower’s architect was Petr Fryazin. Pietro Francesco (years of life unknown, also mentioned in chronicles as Petr Fryazin and Petr Frenchuzhko Fryazin) was an Italian architect in the service of Vasily III.
It is believed he came to Rus in 1494, brought by envoys Manuel Angel and Danila Momyrev. Pietro Francesco built the stone Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin between 1509 and 1511 (construction began in 1508 and was completed in 1515).
Of all the surviving Kremlin towers, Ivanovskaya has reached our time in the worst condition due to constant water exposure, flowing down from Chasovaya Hill and along the wall sections that lacked roofing. Therefore, since the earliest repairs, its walls have been continuously reinforced externally with buttresses on wooden piles. Eventually, behind the buttresses remained only a rubble of stone and brick debris. The tower suffered from fires, and in 1531 a gunpowder explosion occurred inside, leading to its reconstruction with significant changes in appearance. After the explosion, the outer walls above the circular gallery were not restored. On the northeast wall of the gallery, a row of battlements was formed from the former piers between the loopholes. The other sides received small decorative battlements. The tower’s side rooms served as storerooms.
The southern part of the annex next to the tower was used as a prison. In the 17th century, nearby was the district office where interrogations and investigations were conducted.
After the Kremlin lost its military significance (by 1697), repairs and reconstructions continued. The upper superstructure was apparently once again carelessly rebuilt after the fire of 1715 and visually turned into an ordinary one-story house with windows, a low roof with drainpipes, and a chimney. In the same century, due to significant damage, the tower stood empty. Between 1786 and 1788, it was repaired and fully adapted as a prison.
Until 1887, the Ivanovsky police precinct and fire brigade were housed in the tower. In 1815, breach gates with initially flat coverings appeared in the wall next to the tower. At that time, the tower’s outer gates also had flat coverings. In 1819, the last fire occurred in the tower. The battlements of the bypass gallery gradually deteriorated. By then, the house on the tower already had two floors; access was via a staircase hidden in a wooden annex on the tower’s southwest outer side. The annex was decorated on top with wooden battlements. Other wooden temporary structures were built near the tower. During repairs, internal floors were created in new locations as vaults on rails and I-beam iron beams. From 1887 to 1926, the upper superstructure housed the archive of the Nizhny Novgorod Learned Archival Commission with a reading room. In 1934, the tower’s first tier was adapted as a chemical storage, with a concrete floor installed. The tower was also used as a fuel storage. Despite 18th–19th century and 1920s repairs, the tower was in an emergency state. In 1946, the masonry of the inner facade and the vault of the passage began to collapse.
The rectangular-in-plan Ivanovskaya Tower is taller and has a larger base area than other towers. It is also distinguished by its tiered (stepped) construction. An original feature is the circular passage at the level of the Kremlin wall’s fighting gallery, which had a series of additional loopholes. Like the Zachatyevskaya Tower, Ivanovskaya has no rooms under the passage. Initially, there was no moat in front of it either: it was replaced by a high plinth, and a drawbridge (lifting gates) was supposed to lower onto a wooden ramp built in front of the tower. By the 17th century, a moat already existed in front of the tower. It was partially covered by a wooden bridge, onto the edge of which the drawbridge was lowered.
Behind the drawbridge is the first chamber. It is the only one in the Kremlin with two square openings in the vault for firing from above (murder holes). This chamber was separated from the main room by double-leaf gates covered with sheet iron slightly above half their height. Other tower gates did not have such covering. Immediately behind the gates was a portcullis — a grille. It is assumed that portcullises in main passages were wooden and could be covered with iron. Beyond this opened the main room. Originally, it had four fighting fireplaces with loopholes directed along the wall sections. In the 17th century, on the northeast side, there was a timber-earth fortification called an obrub, intended for installing additional powerful artillery. Therefore, at the site of one fireplace, additional smaller gates were cut, leading to the obrub. When the need for this fortification disappeared, the place was completely filled and bricked up.
Apparently, the passage could be fired upon from adjacent rooms (as in almost all gate towers) through internal loopholes that were never restored. Then came another grille, and in the next chamber, two pairs of double-leaf gates opened facing each other. The side passage outside had double-leaf gates behind which was a grille. Judging by the width of the slot in which it moved, it is assumed to have been entirely iron. In this side passage, a log floor remained, leading directly to the obrub platform. The tower’s side casemates and wall sections, as well as the brick spiral staircases leading to the upper tiers, can be accessed from the inner facade through two entrances located on both sides of the passage.
The second tier of the original tower consisted of a bypass gallery at the same level as the fighting gallery of the wall section and the lower room of the superstructure. The gallery most likely had large windows all around (except where slots for the drawbridge levers were located), resembling the fighting windows of the wall sections. This reconstruction is based on the fact that usual Kremlin tower loopholes are located in thick walls and have deep fireplaces. Here, the outer walls are thin, and there is a clear lack of lighting, which was necessary for convenient operation of the drawbridge and portcullis mechanisms.
The tower had a rather complex drawbridge mechanism consisting of a pair of levers, a pair of counterweights, a system of grooves for chains, and a vertical gate in the central room. Portcullises were raised using horizontal cranks, two of which were located in the bypass gallery and one in the central room. The rooms of this tier were covered with wooden floors.
The construction of the upper tiers of the tower is entirely hypothetical. The third tier forms a bypass battlement with crenellations and another floor of the internal superstructure. It is also assumed there was another tier with a battlemented parapet formed by the superstructure. The third and fourth tiers could be reached by wooden stairs.
The tower’s side casemates and wall sections are connected by passages to special rooms — “chambers” located on both sides of the passage on the inner side. They stored “city supplies.” The chambers form two floors corresponding to the first tier of the passage. The southern rooms further connect to rooms of a special building located on the inner side of the wall section. This building housed the well-known “city staircase” mentioned in 17th-century inventories, with its entrance on the southern end. Under the stone staircase was a tall room formed by an 8-meter-wide arch; this room was divided by a wooden floor into two tiers. Only from this floor was there access to the southern side fireplaces of the middle battle. From the lower level, one could ascend a spiral staircase at the northern end to the same room where the city staircase opened and access the fighting gallery of the wall. Even further south, a sunken room with one window was discovered, apparently accessible only through a hatch in the vault to the room above (with a separate entrance). It is believed this may have been a prison.
According to the 1621 inventory, the Ivanovskaya Tower housed 5 copper hand cannons firing cannonballs weighing from 700 grams to 1.5 kilograms. In 1703, the tower itself contained two small copper hand cannons, and on the obrub — 7 hand cannons, the most powerful firing 3-kilogram cannonballs.
For the tower guard’s accommodation, there was a heated hut nearby with railings in front. Depending on the time, the guard consisted of 30 to 10–5 people. By 1697, only 4 townspeople guarded it.
During the tower’s restoration, carried out as part of the Kremlin’s general restoration under architect Agafonov in the 1950s, the option to recreate the presumed original appearance of the tower was chosen. Although the version with an open bypass gallery (after the 1531 explosion) also had the right to exist. The project was successfully implemented, but some minor details were never completed. Wooden floors between tiers, shutters for loopholes, and the parapet of large fighting windows between battlements, as well as the double-leaf gates, were not restored. The recreated mechanism of only one portcullis never became operational. Most importantly, the drawbridge mechanism and the bridge itself were not restored. This meant the tower never became passable. Access to the room behind the permanently lowered grilles was completely closed to visitors. The annex with the city staircase was also inaccessible until recently. Nevertheless, the tower acquired a quite “medieval” appearance, disturbed only by a massive commemorative plaque on the facade to the left of the gates.
The fact that the tower was not passable led to the decision to organize one of the exhibitions of the Nizhny Novgorod State Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve in its passage. To create a warm room, all passages were closed with glazed frames in a “Euro-renovation” style, loopholes were also glazed, and a balcony-ramp with iron railings was built in front of the tower’s facade for visitor exit. The same construction company partially reclad the tower and the adjacent wall. At the same time, external ventilation duct outlets of the fighting fireplaces were sealed, and the patches of new brick sharply stood out in color against the old masonry. Latticed double-leaf gates stylized as old were hung on the breach gates next to the tower.
Nizhny Novgorod local historians insist on eliminating the last distortions of the tower’s appearance and restoring all features of medieval fortification, including the mechanisms for raising the portcullises and the drawbridge.
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