Serpukhov Kremlin is the central part of the medieval Russian town of Serpukhov. It was built on the left bank of Nara river at the Cathedral Hill. Unlike many other city fortifications in Russia Serpukhov Kremlin was constructed from white stone. Today only parts of the original city walls remain. Serpukhov Kremlin was built in 1374 out of oak tree that grew here in abundance around Nara river. Oak beams gave a shape to city walls and most of strength was provided by soil and rocks that filled the walls. Serpukhov Kremlin had only entrance to make defense of the town easier. Second entrance was added in the 19th century to ease traffic through the historic center. In the 16th century Serpukhov Kremlin becomes part of massive defenses against Crimean Khanate. Serpukhov held a strategic Senkin point that was commonly used to transport people and whole armies on their way to Moscow.
White Stone Serpukhov Kremlin was constructed in 1556 replacing wooden military defenses. So current Kremlin repeats the same outline as a medieval Serpukhov fortifications. Military construction didn't end there. Residents of Serpukhov built a wooden fortress to protect Serpukhov harbor. Its total length measure at a thousand meters. Serpukhov Kremlin was demolished during winter 1934 to use material for the construction of the Moscow Subway. Only parts of original city walls survive today.
The oak Kremlin in Serpukhov was built in 1374 after Prince Vladimir
Andreevich made Serpukhov the main city of the specific principality. It
was located on a high cape at the confluence of the Serpeika River with
the Nara. During the construction, the cape was separated from the
Ilyinskaya mountain by a “digging”, and then cut and sprinkled with clay
and sand. From the "digging" to the Kremlin, the only entrance was
arranged in the form of a steep ramp, following the outline of the shaft
(the second entrance, from the south, was made much later, at the
beginning of the 19th century).
After 1507, when the Crimean
Khanate became a constant and irreconcilable enemy of Rus', Vasily III
created a powerful line of defense on the banks of the Oka, based on the
fortress cities of the Oka. The center of this defensive system was
Serpukhov, standing on the shortest road from Moscow to Tula. In
addition, not far from Serpukhov was the famous Senkin ferry, through
which the Tatars most often “climbed the Oka”.
The white-stone
Kremlin appeared in 1556. The builders of stone walls and towers,
gradually replacing the wooden fortifications, repeated the
configuration of the oak Kremlin. The new fortress-citadel, without
violating the ensemble of ancient Serpukhov at all, introduced two new
colors into the urban landscape: the dazzling whiteness of the walls and
the golden ocher of the hewn tower roofs.
The fortification of
the city did not end with the construction of the stone Serpukhov
Kremlin. At the same time, a wooden prison was being built to protect
the settlement with the city market. The total length of the prison was
more than a thousand meters.
During the Time of Troubles, the
strategic frontier guarded by the city-fortress became a frontier of
unrest and rebellion, separating the seething, uprising-ridden southern
regions of Russia from the central districts of the state adjacent to
the capital. Surrounded by numerous supporters, the impostor received
the most prominent Moscow boyars in Serpukhov, Bolotnikov’s detachments
entered the gates of the impregnable white-stone fortress opened by the
inhabitants of the city, the governors of Tsar Vasily Shuisky held a
review of the military force gathered in the “Serpukhov campaign” ... In
1609 Serpukhov was stormed by the Poles led by Pan Mlotsky; they will
burn the settlements, but they will not be able to take the Kremlin.
Hetman Sahaidachny will also try to capture the city in 1618, but he
will also not be able to break through the settlement.
In the
middle of the 17th century, the last defensive structure of Serpukhov
was erected - a newly received prison that protected Podil of the city.
It seems that the main purpose of this construction was to protect two
high hills - the so-called Voskresenskaya and Afanasievskaya mountains,
from which it was possible to conduct direct artillery shelling of the
Kremlin.
In 1633, when the Crimean prince Mubarak-Gerai plundered
the left-bank districts along the Oka, the inhabitants of Serpukhov shut
themselves up in a stone fortress for the last time. Since then, not
enemy weapons, but fires have been the most formidable and inevitable
disaster for the city. The fire instantly spread throughout the
completely wooden city, destroying both residential courtyards, and the
wooden buildings of the Serpukhov fortifications, and the tops of the
Kremlin towers and walls. After the fire of 1645, the repair of the
Kremlin was carried out by the “town builder, the Duma clerk” Afanasy
Osipovich Pronchishchev. But nevertheless, in 1650, the voivode Andrey
Olenin, who examined the Kremlin, found it in poor condition: “The
towers are not covered, the hiding places are lost.” A strong fire in
1669 was the main reason for the beginning of the destruction of the
monument. The estimate list of 1681 already speaks of the frequent
collapses of the towers.
By the end of the 17th century,
Serpukhov finally lost its military significance. The Kremlin and
prisons are not being repaired. Only in 1708, fearing the attack of
Charles XII on Moscow, Peter I remembers Serpukhov and orders, if
possible, to “strengthen and palisade” the city. But the situation, as
you know, soon changed, and the need to repair the Serpukhov
fortifications disappeared. Their condition constantly worries the city
magistrate, as the rotten wooden towers threaten to collapse, and in the
Kremlin "stones are falling in considerable numbers." Therefore, in
1767, a decision was made “to dig the city rampart” and dismantle the
remaining wooden walls. Probably, for these works, the first large-scale
plan of all the defensive structures of the city was drawn up, which is
stored in the Military Historical Archive. This document is so far the
only source of information about the construction of the white-stone
fortifications of the Russian fortified city.
The ruins of the
Serpukhov Kremlin attracted the attention of the compilers of the Atlas
of Materials for Statistics of the Russian Empire, published in St.
Petersburg in 1839. On the two lithographs depicting Serpukhov placed in
it, only one southwestern half-tower is marked, and the walls are shown
with great losses and destruction. Perhaps, such a picture was, among
other things, also the result of the well-known decree of Paul I, who
ordered in 1797 to dismantle the dilapidated fortifications of ancient
cities near Moscow. Nevertheless, in 1852-1853, the Serpukhov Kremlin,
as a recognized "monument of antiquity", was fortified and fragmentarily
restored. Some time later (1888), the Archaeological Society secured
funds for the further restoration of the best-preserved fragments.
In the winter of 1934, the Kremlin was dismantled for material for
the construction of the Moscow Metro. This was done by order of Lazar
Kaganovich, according to which rubble stone was required for
construction work. Since the construction of the Moscow metro was a
political action, everything had to be done very quickly. They decided
to take the stone from the most accessible and nearest place - from
Serpukhov. To do this, the Serpukhov Kremlin was dismantled for about a
year. After that, the cargo was sent to Moscow. However, in the end, the
stone was rejected. And it went not to Moscow construction sites, but to
other cities. That is, he simply dispersed without a trace across
Russia. At the same time, no one compensated for the damage to the
cultural heritage of Serpukhov, since it was a state object, and the
state itself did not consider it necessary to compensate for the damage.
Only two tiny fragments of the walls remained on the Kremlin hill.
The Serpukhov Kremlin, which has no direct analogies in the practice
of building stone fortifications throughout the entire 16th century, is
an interesting monument of Russian fortress architecture. First of all,
its building material is unique: the Kremlin is completely built of
white stone. In other fortresses of that time, white stone already
played a supporting role. Even in the second half of the 15th century,
this material was almost everywhere replaced by brick, but in Serpukhov,
where white stone is literally at hand, construction from it continued
until the middle of the 17th century. In addition, the city had its own
cadres of professional masons. “Stone Teshot” is written about the
inhabitants of Ivanovskaya Sloboda in the hundredth (census) book of
1552, which was compiled, apparently, in order to identify the economic
opportunities of the city on the eve of the construction of a stone
fortress.
The battle walls covered the territory of the Kremlin,
following the outlines of a natural hill, and not the lines of an
architectural plan, as was typical for the fortress architecture of the
time of Ivan the Terrible. The plan of the Kremlin was an irregular
triangle with a perimeter of 933 meters. The widespread use of artillery
began to strongly affect the forms of fortifications, and this was
primarily reflected in the construction of the walls. With a significant
thickness (3.5 meters), they are not so high (6.5-8.5 meters). The wide
combat gallery is designed for convenient placement of guns and
squeakers. The towers were located in the places of the most significant
breaks in the wall, which excluded the possibility of the existence of
unfired spaces. The half-towers (there were three of them) are another
interesting feature of the Serpukhov Kremlin. They were U-shaped
projections of the walls in plan and were taller than ordinary spindles.
Half-towers were built near the main towers, on the breaks of the wall,
in cases where the intermediate span was relatively short.
The
use of artillery had a particularly significant impact on the solution
of fortress entrances. If the fortresses of the 14th-15th centuries,
unfamiliar with the “fiery duel”, had complex entrances, consisting of
diversion archers, zakhabs, etc., then in the fortifications of the 16th
century the need for them disappeared - simple travel towers appeared.
All the more unexpected in terms of skill and ingenuity of the solution
is the system of passage of the Serpukhov Kremlin. This most important
defensive knot was a modified sleeve zahab. The existing entrance to the
Kremlin led to the Spassky Gates, arranged in the wall between the
octagonal Guard Tower and the diversion half-tower. The gate led into a
narrow long pocket formed by two parallel walls, one of which was a
diversion. And, finally, in order to get to the territory of the Kremlin
itself, it was necessary to pass the Big Passing Tower, which, in
addition, had a bend of the passage bending at a right angle. The branch
part controlled the entrance and at the same time did not interfere with
the shooting, since its height was less than the height of the main
walls. It even provided a secret passage through which the besieged
could unexpectedly hit the enemy.
The appearance of such a
passage, typical for fortresses of an earlier time, of course, cannot be
explained only by the fact that the new stone kremlin repeated the
layout of the old, wooden one. The creators of the Serpukhov Kremlin
were well acquainted with the weapons of the Crimean Tatars, who did not
have their own siege artillery. True, the Turkish sultan sent them
Janissaries with cannons, but there were very few of them, and during
the siege of fortresses, mainly field or obsolete guns were used.
Therefore, the Crimean Tatars could not count on breaking through the
defense of the fortress in any other place, except for the gate. The
Serpukhov Kremlin completely ruled out this possibility.
If you
approach the very edge of the Kremlin hill, you can find a narrow path
that goes around its entire territory in the same place where the battle
wall passed. Small platforms along the way are reminiscent of the towers
that once towered here. The platform, located above the entrance, marks
the site of the octagonal Guard Tower, which housed the powder chamber.
Behind it, opposite the settlement, stood the Northern half-tower, which
fixed a significant break in the wall. Between the Northern half-tower
and the round Voskresenskaya tower following it, there was a small wall
spinning. A fragment with a narrow passage has been preserved from it,
and in it there is a device for lifting the grating-gersa. The walls on
the outer and inner sides were made of massive blocks of white stone,
and the middle was rammed with small bedrock on lime mortar. From the
inside, the wall was dissected by large arched niches with chambers.
Outside, the wall had machicules - special hinged loopholes for shelling
the enemy, who broke through directly to its foot.
The next
section of the wall from the Resurrection Tower ran parallel to Serpeika
to the round small Nikolskaya Tower, in which a wooden hiding place with
a well was arranged to supply the besieged with water. A fragment of a
wall has also been preserved from this spinner. It was exactly chopped
off from the south during the construction of a new entrance, at the
same time several buttresses supporting the wall were added. From the
south, in the part where the Kremlin was facing the Oka, towards the
monasteries, the battle wall was reinforced (and decorated!) with the
octagonal Vysotskaya Tower. From it, the wall ran parallel to Nara, and
then through the South half-tower and the Big Passing Tower approached
the entrance.
Of all the buildings inside the Kremlin, the Trinity Cathedral is
currently preserved - an artistic, landscape and spiritual landmark of
the entire city.
On a small square in front of the cathedral
there was an administrative center of the city and the district. From
here, Serpukhov, who paid tribute to the treasury with honey, was ruled
by tiuns and governors. During the reform period of the mid-16th
century, they were replaced by elected labial elders and city clerks. In
addition, Moscow-appointed governors who were in charge of the military
forces of the Bereg were almost constantly in the city ... Meanwhile,
one should not imagine representative, extensive buildings of local
government in the center of ancient Serpukhov. Serpukhov's government,
administrative and military, was located in the siding and lip hut, the
voivodship house, in a word, in just a few log houses, which looked
little different from ordinary city dwellings.
A little aside was
the second Kremlin temple - the Church of St. Demetrius of Thessalonica,
mentioned since the end of the 15th century.
The rest of the
territory of the stone city was filled with siege yards of the
surrounding monasteries, estates, villages and villages. Half-empty in
peacetime, the siege yards were kept by people specially settled in the
fortress - janitors. Whereas everything related to the defense of the
Kremlin was under the jurisdiction of city clerks, who monitored the
serviceability of the “cages” for squeakers, the “green treasury” with
rooms for cores and bullets, “nitrate copper boilers”, “bread
granaries”.
Currently, in addition to the Trinity Cathedral, the
foundation and fragments of the walls of the Kremlin, on Cathedral Hill
there is a memorial to the soldiers who fell in the Great Patriotic War,
a stable and several private houses.
The first official archaeological research of the Serpukhov Kremlin
was carried out by the local historian N. V. Voronkov in the 1920s. In
the 1980s, N. V. Kolyshnitsyn and A. A. Molchanov uncovered the
foundations (but not all) of the ancient Kremlin walls. In 2003, the
Institute of Architecture of the Russian Academy of Sciences organized
new excavations - about 20 square meters were studied. Professor, Doctor
of Chemical Sciences A.L. Aleksandrovsky took part in the excavations.
In the summer of 2006, the excavation area more than doubled. One of the
main initiators of these studies was Artyom Pavlikhin, a researcher at
the Serpukhov Museum of History and Art. The excavations were headed by
professors of archeology G. N. Belorybkin and V. V. Stavitsky.
In
the inner part of the fortress (on a plot of 56 square meters), the
researchers had many finds. The remains of the Vysotskaya tower of the
Kremlin (1556) were discovered. It was found that the architecture of
the Serpukhov fortress had much in common with the northwestern Russian
and Western European. It was possible to identify a medieval street that
went from the center of the fortress to the Vysotskaya Tower. Along a
crooked and narrow street - right next to each other - at home. For the
XIV-XV centuries - these are large houses of the princely farmstead. For
the XVI-XVII centuries - small houses of the townspeople.
Among
the finds dating back to the 16th-17th centuries, there are earrings,
buckles, rings, pectoral crosses. Of interest is a copper coin depicting
a bird, as well as a rare collection of weapons from the first half of
the 17th century: a fragment of a saber, squeaker balls, a bullet, a
screw from a firearm, combat knives, arrowheads of a crossbow and a bow.
Fragments of the sole of a leather boot or shoe from the beginning of
the 15th century are unique. The collection is supplemented with ceramic
vessels from the 14th-17th centuries. A particularly interesting find is
a unique seal of the 16th century with the inscription “seal of Naim’s
fortress” and the image of the sovereign on the throne and two more
people - one with a saber raised above his head, the other without a
weapon, a crescent moon hangs over their heads.
Flint tools were
found on the site of the settlement - traces of human presence there in
the Stone Age. In 2006, archaeologists became aware of a burial on
Cathedral Hill, performed according to the rite of corpse-burning on the
side, which so far has not been attributed to any known archaeological
culture. The research revealed the development of the settlement in the
XII-XVII centuries, characterized the main discovered structures and
objects.