On the right-hand side of Cathedral Square is a most impressive tower consisting of three sections combined into a single harmonic whole. This is the Ivan the Great Bell-Tower, a world-famous monument of sixteenth-century Russian architecture.

Ivan the Great Bell-Tower and Belfry

      The tower is the main compositional focal point of the Kremlin ensemble. It unites around it, so to say, all the various buildings of different periods and styles.
      In 1329 on the orders of Grand Prince Ivan the Moneybag a stone bell-tower with the Church of St. John Climacus was erected on the east side of Cathedral Square. Two centuries later it was in a bad state of disrepair and did not fit in with the new Kremlin erected by Ivan III. On his instructions the Italian architect Bon Fryazin began erecting a new two-tiered bell-tower with a church in 1505 at the same time as building started on the Archangel Cathedral.
      The new bell-tower was obviously intended to be the vertical focal point of the Kremlin.
      The bell-tower was completed in 1508, at the same time as the Archangel Cathedral. It consisted of two octagonal pillars, placed one on top of the other, tapering towards the top and crowned with a dome on a circular drum. The lower tier had an arcade at the top for bells and ended with a cornice. The second tier was more elongated and also had an arcade for bells at the top. The walls of the bell-tower were pierced by a few narrow windows, which emphasized the building's massive proportions.
      Some specialists believe that the Kremlin bell-tower was influenced by Russian wooden watch-towers which were sometimes very high. It is possible that the bell-tower of the St. Joseph Monastery of Volokolamsk erected in 1495 served as a model for it.
      In the course of restoration work carried out comparatively recently specialists discovered a constructional peculiarity of the tower's foundations. They go down to a depth of just over four metres below ground level. This disproved the legend that the bell-tower's foundations reached all the way down to the bottom of Borovitsky Hill. Investigations showed that the bell-tower stands on an octagonal stone foundation resting on piles. Its first few tiers have metal girders to strengthen the walls. Thanks to this the walls required no further reinforcement when the upper tiers were added.
      At the beginning of the seventeenth century further tiers were built on to the bell-tower. It then acquired its present appearance, a height of 81 metres, and the name of Ivan the Great.
      Two new tiers were added to the two tiers built by Bon Fryazin. The upper octagon was decorated with a double row of kokoshniks. Above this is a cylindrical section with false narrow windows painted black. Under the gold dome are three rows of an inscription in gilt letters on copper leaf against a blue background. The old Slavonic script says that by the grace of the Holy Trinity and the Tsar and Grand Prince Boris and his son Theodore the said church was built and adorned with gold in 1600. During the most recent restoration of the bell-tower 543 square metres of its surface were gilded.
      A seven-metre-long cross made of wood covered with gilded copper leaf crowns the bell-tower which also served as a military look-out tower.
      Ivan the Great is a remarkably harmonious and well-proportioned building. One might think that its construction in two stages separated by almost a century and its considerable height with a relatively small mass would make it badly proportioned. This is not the case, however. The builders managed to make it appear remarkably light and well-balanced.
      Ivan the Great is not only a first-class architectural monument, but also a fine example of the building techniques of that period.
      The body of the tower is made of brick, but the socle and foundations consist of blocks of white stone. The thickness of the walls is up to five metres in the first tier, half of that in the second and less than a metre in the two upper tiers. The staircase of the first tier is in the wall, the second tier has a spiral staircase in the centre, and the third an iron staircase in the form of a spiral round the inner perimeter of the wall. All three staircases have 329 steps and lead to terraces and galleries from which there are splendid views of Moscow.
      In 1812 Napoleon's forces tried to blow up the bell-tower as they retreated from Moscow. The powerful explosion destroyed the buildings next to it, but the tower itself survived with nothing worse than a crack in its circular drum.
      In 1532 construction began on its north side of an adjoining belfry of the type which was particularly widespread in Novgorod. The work was supervised by Pe-trok Maly, who called himself the Pope's architect. The building went slowly. Petrok Maly concentrated mainly on erecting the fortified walls of Kitai Gorod, the traders' and artisans' centre. The belfry was completed after Petrok Maly's departure in 1543 by Russian masters. It had four tiers and was topped by a gilded dome on a high drum. In 1552 a splendid double flight of steps with broad observation platforms was built onto the facade of the third tier.
      From the very outset the belfry contained a church. At the end of the eighteenth century the Church of St. Nicholas of Gostunsky was moved into the belfry. Ivan Fyodo-rov, who printed the first dated Russian book in 1564, was a deacon of this church.
      In 1624 on the instructions of Patriarch Philaret the stone-mason Bazhen Ogurtsov built a new bell-tower with a sharp-pointed tent roof onto the belfry. Subsequently this became known as the Philaret Annexe.
      In 1812 the belfry and Philaret Annexe were destroyed by Napoleon's retreating troops. They were restored by Ivan Gilardi to a design by the architects Ivan Ye-gotov and Luigi Rusca. Since no documents have survived to show what these buildings looked like before restoration, we can only assume that they were reproduced as closely as possible to the originals.
      At present there are twenty-one bells hanging in the Ivan the Great Bell-Tower and the belfry.
      The biggest of them is the Resurrection Bell weighing about seventy tons.

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