Tula’s Kremlin

The dead-end Tower on the cellar does not have loop-holes. Beside it in the wall there was a passage to the bank of Upa. A special feature of the Ivanovskaya (Taynitskaya) tower is a 70-meter-long hiding place laid over with oak boards.

The western Spasskaya tower was the highest: its height exceeded 15 meters. It had four floors and an observation platform with a bell. The northern Naugolnaya tower also had four floors.

The Kremlin was surrounded by a ditch with lift bridges near the gates. On the territory around Tula’s Kremlin according to regulations of that time houses were not built within the distance of 202 meters.

At the present time on the place of the ditch of Tula’s Kremlin there’s a city garden laid out in 1930s.

Most likely, Tula’s Kremlin was built by several crews of craftsmen – so different are its walls. Moreover, it is believed that a foreign (most likely, Italian) architect participated in the construction.

Mighty Tula’s fortress securely protected the city from the enemies. Trade and industrial arts gradually developed here. The earliest of the Books of the Penmen (1587-1589) mentions the territory of the town – wooden and earth fortifications about 3 and a half kilometers long. It was surrounded by a fence of logs with sharpened ends on top which guarded the territory of around 65 ha – which was ten times as big as the area of the Kremlin.

The town emerged after the stone Kremlin. It surrounded the Kremlin in the form of a semi-ring on one side adjoining its Naugolnaya tower and on the other side adjoining Ivanovskaya tower. The fence was fortified by 22 towers that were square-angled in the lay-out. The town also had seven passable towers. The main one of them, Krapivenskaya, guarded its gates on the southern side.

In the Kremlin in 1684-1685 five-domed Uspensky cathedral was built, which replaced the old wooden Uspenskaya church. Not far away from the Kremlin, in the town a typical for town churches of XVII century Blagoveschenskaya church was erected (1692). It is the second oldest (after the Kremlin) building in Tula that has remained until now.

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