Trinity Tower

XV — XVII centuries

A significant part of the preserved Kremlin towers existed already in 1339–1340 in the wooden fortress of Prince Ivan Kalita . There is an opinion that in the place of the modern Trinity Gate there was a deaf tower. When the Kremlin was reorganized into a white stone under Dmitry Donskoy , the Rizopolozhensky passage gates ^{[10] [11] [6] were} laid in its place.

The tower, which was called the Second Rizopolozhenskaya Tower, was allegedly built in 1495-1499 under the leadership of the Italian architect Aleviz Fryazin, when, on the orders of Ivan III, the fortress was rebuilt from a white stone to a brick one. While the construction of many towers of that period, such as Borovitskaya and Vodovzvodnaya , took one year, work on the Trinity Gate was delayed due to two devastating fires of 1493 : craftsmen and technicians were busy repairing burnt buildings ^[12] .

At the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries, the Kremlin was primarily a fortification complex and was the main target for a possible enemy attack. To strengthen its defensive power, under the leadership of Aleviz Fryazin they formed the “Kremlin triangle”: the walls of the fortress were bricked, straightened and leveled in height. The peak of the western part of the triangle was the Trinity Gate, in a straight line from them was the Spasskaya Tower ^[7] . Two of these buildings were built in the same style and received a similar internal layout: four internal floors with high arches were surrounded by five tiers of smaller sizes, where there were stairs and passages ^[6] .

The Trinity Tower was a typical example of military architecture of that time: the gate arches were located on a straight axis, perpendicular to the fortress wall, and rose six meters above the ground. At the base were rumors and climbs for plantar combat, the upper perimeter of the tower was surrounded by battlements and mounted loopholes - mashikuli . A special shoot was coming from the ground to the tower walls, from which further it was possible to go right through to the Middle and Corner Arsenal towers. Unlike Spassky, the Trinity Gate received two diverting archers at once. The first adjoined the tower closely, and the second - Kutafya - was connected to it by the Trinity Bridge. If the enemy stormed the Kremlin from the Smolensk tract , the attackers would have to make many turns in the firing zone and overcome significant fortification obstacles. Through Neglinnaya from the Kutafya tower to the Trinity gates there was a low wooden bridge on stilts and with a lifting middle, in 1516 it was replaced by a stone ^{[13] [4] [6]} .

A prison was located at the base of the tower in the 16th – 17th centuries: during excavations of the 19th century , a two-tier cellar was discovered under the gateway. From the upper part there were passages to the Kremlin and the Kremlin Garden . Below were two "stone bags", which could only be reached through a hole in the ceiling. From the Court of Justice building in the immediate vicinity to these basements was a staircase. According to the annals , executions were periodically carried out at the Rizopolozhensky Gate ^{[14] [15]} .

In 1585, a chime clock was installed on the tower with “ arshin long and wide” dials and three bells . The device of the clock was different from the modern one: the rotating disk was divided into daytime and nighttime, and the hand remained stationary ^[16] . In working condition, the mechanism was supported by the watchmakers of the Spasskaya Tower, although Troitskaya was assigned its own staff of workers ^[17] . There is information that their salary was four rubles and six Altyn per year:

In their position, they were lower than the watchmakers of the Spasskaya Tower. They were often forgotten with a salary, and when there was serious work on the construction of the clock of the Trinity Tower, it was performed by the Spassky watchmakers and the reward for the work slipped out of the hands of the Trinity watchmakers. In view of this, the place of the watchmaker of the Spasskaya Tower was the subject of lust and harassment for the Trinity watchmakers, who, in turn, were intrigued by the even more seedy watchmakers of the Tainitsky Gate ^[6] .

XVII century

Until the XVII century, in the literature and speech of Muscovites, the tower was called differently: Rizopolozhenskaya, Epiphany, Znamenskaya - by the gate icon and Kuretnaya - in honor of the gate of the same name of the imperial palace ^[18] . By the middle of the century, like many other Kremlin buildings, the tower gradually fell into decay. The list of decay of 1646 indicated:

Under the Znamensky Gates, a descent to the hearing is clogged <...> the corners on both sides are upholstered in brick and in two and three bricks along a circle and up the fathom, and the tower settled in two places. At the same tower <...> 5 shoots of the stairway showered, but in the tower near the dungeon the arch was dispersed ^[19] .

The list of decay of 1667 indicated even more serious damage:

In the tower <...> the upper arches are strewed and supported by boards and a lot of bricks hang. The middle vault collapsed along the fathom by two, and across the fathom. Yes, around the tower at the railing the arches are thin and in many places collapsed ^[19] .

The renewal of the Kremlin ensemble took place during the reign of Tsar Fedor Alekseevich and Tsarevna Sophia . Then the new buildings of the orders and the Miracle Monastery were erected, the walls and towers were repaired, most of which were added to the pinnacles and white stone decor ^[17] . By order of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, the Rizopolozhenskaya tower in 1658 was officially called the Trinity, in honor of the nearby courtyard of the Trinity-Sergius Monastery. The gate archway was decorated with an icon of the temple saints ^{[6] [20]} .

On April 8, 1681, the watchmaker of the Spasskaya Tower Andreyanko Danilov received an order to make new watches for the Trinity Tower. It took him two years to work, the estimate was 130 rubles. In 1683, the Trinity Tower received a new watch, a larger one, with dials on both sides. The diameter of each of them was 1 ¾ arshin. Six more bells were added to the three former bells, from four to half a pound weighing. The old clock was dismantled and transported to the village of Preobrazhenskoye , where it was installed on the palace gates. For his work Danilov received 15 rubles in gold ^[21] .

In 1685, many buildings of the Kremlin received a new design - by that time the fortress had lost its defense significance and turned into a representative royal residence. To make the appearance of the towers more ceremonial, tent tops were added to them and a diverse decor of the facades was added. Five towers, including Troitskaya, received sculptural weathercocks in the form of double-headed eagles . The superstructure of the Trinity Tower was in the same style with Spasskaya, as they were on the same line and visually made up the general composition ^{[5] [6]} .

In 1686, the master Karp Zolotarev was to "cover the tower with a painting and grate an eagle on it." The clock made two years ago “seemed too insignificant” against the background of a high hipped peak, therefore, already in 1686 Andreyanko Danilov received an order for new ones: “2 2 arshins long, 1 ½ arshins wide, tall - as the size indicates; and the counting of eight bells, the ninth battle. " The previous mechanism was dismantled and transported to the Danilov Monastery . The main bell for the new watch was cast by the master Fyodor Motorin ^[19] .

18th century

A new era in the history of the Kremlin began under the reign of Peter I. By his order in 1702, the construction of the Arsenal building began on the burned out part between the Troitskaya and Sobakina towers. Two years later, the emperor ordered a new watch for the Spasskaya and Trinity towers in Amsterdam , already in 1705 both mechanisms were installed. Under the guidance of master Kuzma Ivanov, five workers from the Zhitniy Dvor raised 34 bells for chimes to the tower ^{[16] [22] [23]} .

With the beginning of the Northern War , the threat of invasion of the troops of Charles XII arose in Moscow, in connection with which Peter I ordered the construction of small bricks along the Kremlin walls, and fill the drains in the 17th century with water. In 1707, the loopholes of the tower were expanded under heavy cannons , at the base of the gate on either side of the bridge a Troitsky bastion was poured. After a series of defeats of the Swedish army and the decisive Battle of Poltava, the threat of attack on Moscow disappeared, but the built ditches and mounds remained for a long time ^[24] .

The chimes established by the order of Peter broke down already in 1731. At the end of February 1734, master Johann Christopher Ferster was invited from St. Petersburg to repair them. After inspecting the tower, he submitted the following report to the Senate :

Nevertheless, in August 1734, the Senate decided to fix the chimes on the Trinity Tower. The missing eight bells for them were taken from the courtyard of the Cannon Order : during the Swedish war, more than 600 bells were transported there “for transferring to cannons”. Information about whether the repair of Ferster was successful was not preserved. During the Trinity fire in 1737, the tower was badly damaged: the whole clock mechanism burned out, the bells collapsed, and the main one broke the arch of the building ^{[23] [25]} .

Further information about the state of the tower is fragmentary: it is known that in 1754 the Gofintendant office sent the carpenter Erich to fix and activate the clockwork, and before the visit of Elizaveta Petrovna in 1775, repairs were again required. The inventory of 1776 indicated the presence of "dilapidation and cracks" in the walls of the tower ^[23] . However, at the funeral of the Moscow mayor Grigory Chernyshev in 1784, “the bell musician played with his hands and feet even the“ Holy God ”” ^[26] .

XIX century

The Trinity Gate suffered in the Patriotic War of 1812, when the Kremlin was mined during the retreat of the French army . From explosions and the ensuing fire in the tower, the main clock bell collapsed again, breaking four arches. The tower was in ruin for more than ten years: only in 1823 the internal ceilings were repaired, but they did not begin to restore the clockwork. In 1848, the main bell was transferred to the Borovitskaya Tower ^{[27] [28]} .

In the period from 1868 to 1870, the tower was completely rebuilt: they decided to place the Moscow department of the Archive of the Imperial Court in it . To do this, the building was dismantled to the very foundation and shifted again, but in the process many original design details were lost, loopholes were laid. The project was led by architects A. Porokhovshchikov and N. Azanchevsky, according to other sources - Alexei Martynov . During this period, the location of internal arches and ceilings was changed, slots for the lowering grates and the entrance to the former bell tower were laid. The estimate amounted to 31,003 rubles, another 4,589 was worth a new weather vane, a two-headed eagle. From 1870, the office of the archive was sitting in the adjacent diversion strelitzi, and about 107 thousand cases were in the repository of the Trinity Tower ^{[17] [29] [30]} .

At the end of the XIX century, the next restoration of the tower was carried out according to the project of the chairman of the Moscow Architectural Society Nikolai Shokhin ^[31] .

XX — XXI centuries

In 1901, the Trinity Bridge was repaired, but in the process the ramps and stairs of the construction of 1821 were demolished. A year later, the historian Pyotr Bartenev published a large study of all the buildings of the Kremlin ensemble, which gave the following description of the images of the Trinity Tower:

In the same edition the exact measurements of the tower are indicated: 32.5 fathoms (69.3 meters) in height, of which 14.5 (30.9 meters) were in the lower massif, and 18 (38.4 meters) were in the tented superstructure. The base perimeter was 35 fathoms (74.6 meters), inside the tower there were nine floors ^[32] .

When the Bolsheviks stormed the Kremlin in 1917, the Icon of the Sign of the Mother of God was pierced by a bullet . In the post-revolutionary years, traces of the icon were lost and its further fate is unknown. Since the 1930s, an icon case has remained empty on the inside of the tower, where the icon of the Trinity ^{[15] [33] [34]} was formerly located.

In 1935, it was decided to design the spiers on the Kremlin towers in the form appropriate to Soviet ideology - they ordered the eagles to be removed as symbols of tsarism, and proletarian stars should be installed in their place. The eagle of the Trinity Tower was not monolithic, but prefabricated, with bolt mounts, so it was dismantled in parts right on the spot. In 1937, the semiprecious star was replaced by a modern ruby mass of 1300 kg and a diameter of five meters ^{[35] [36]} .

In the second half of the 20th century , from 1973 to 1981, the most extensive restoration of the Moscow Kremlin took place. The project was led by architects Alexey Vasilievich Vorobyov and Alexey Ivanovich Khamtsov. Under their leadership, the Troitskaya Tower was repaired in 1975: cracks in the masonry walls were reinforced with injections of fixative and special steel screeds, the facade was tinted and covered with a water-repellent composition. Instead of a tiled roof, a copper one was made; separately, the fragments of white stone decor were restored ^[37] .

In 2015, the last restoration of the tower took place, the work lasted nine months. During this period, the Presidential Orchestra rehearsing in the tower was transferred to another building, but the passage through the gate did not stop. Particular attention was paid to the restoration of the star on the spire: the rotary mechanism and fasteners were completely replaced, the frame was cleaned, and the three-layer glass was disassembled into separate segments and washed manually. A 5000- watt lamp was replaced with an energy - saving metal-halogen lamp ^{[8] [38] [39]} .

Since 1918, when the Soviet government, headed by Vladimir Lenin, moved to the Kremlin, a separate military unit was formed to protect it. It included a special team of 20 people - their duties included musical accompaniment of combat training and the solemn changing of the guard . Since 1922, delegations and representative offices of foreign states began to come to the Kremlin, and a permanent group was formed to hold official receptions from Kremlin musicians. September 11, 1938 she received the official title of the orchestra of the Office of the Commandant of the Moscow Kremlin. Presumably, at the same time, the Trinity Tower became its main rehearsal site ^{[40] [41]} . On January 11, 1993, by order of the President of Russia Boris Yeltsin, the orchestra received its modern name - the Presidential Orchestra of the Moscow Kremlin Commandant’s Office of the Main Directorate of the Protection of the Russian Federation ^[42] .

• Trinity Tower on the site of the Moscow Kremlin Museums
• Video report on the restoration of 2015