The Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin
The Ivanovskaya Tower was equipped with a lifting bridge spanning a ditch. The gates had a wicket in them. A separate lifting bridge led to it. Portcullis of the wicket and gates were raised and lowered by the winch set on the second floor.
The tower from the inside had an adjacent part with a “city ladder,” upon which defenders of the Kremlin ascended to the wall. The same adjacent part had a chamber for captives and criminals.
To stop the process of the ruin of Ivanovskaya Tower because of continual waters flowing down from the mountain a number of buttresses were joined to the tower, which helped it survive until this day.
A round tower, now bearing the name of Kladovaya, is situated at the beginning of the Zelensky exit’s tube. The tower received its name from the word “klad” (it was used as storage place). In XVII-XVIII, the tower was called Alexeevskaya –– after a church located nearby, built in 1642.
Quadrangular Nikolskaya Tower (which used to be a pass tower in the past) is located in the curve of a “pipe” of Zelensky exit. It received its name from the church of Nicolas the Wonderworker which was situated on the opposite end of the “pipe” of Zelensky exit. In the ancient times the tower had a drawbridge and a ditch dug in front of it. It did not have any fortifications before the bridge like the ones built in front of the Dmitrovskaya Tower.
The Nikolskaya tower rises today over the Zelensky exit, across which a concrete bridge was built in 1984. It is constructed on the site of a wooden bridge on cribwork that stood here in the past and led to the Nikolskaya Tower’s gates.
Another tower of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin — Tainitskaya Tower — received its name from an exit that it had in it — a hiding place, the half-filled remnants of which were found and destroyed in the last century’s eighties. Today’s horizon of the soil in front of the Tainitskaya Tower and its curtain wall is 1.5-2 meters lower than the ancient one. From the inward side the curtain wall is reinforced by earth up to the top of the battle platform.
A round tower called Koromyslovaya is the last one in a chain of towers of the mountain top section of the Kremlin facing the side not protected from the enemies’ attacks by natural hindrances. The tower is located beneath the juncture of the tube’s joining with Pochainsky ravine. The origin of the tower’s name is related by the local lore to two versions of a popular legend:
In 1520, Astrakhan Tatars headed by Sahib Geray besieged the city. The Tatars used slyness to attempt to capture the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin and in the night time neared its walls. Early in the morning one of Nizhny Novgorod’s women went out to get some water. When she saw Tatars she engaged in an unequal fight with them and beat ten of them with her shoulder yoke to death before one of them managed to kill her with a saber’s strike.
The Tatars did some hard thinking — “What kind of warriors must they have if their young girls are so brave.” And they quietly cleared off from Nizhny Novgorod’s walls.
According to another legend, the building of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin began with this very tower. To strengthen the construction a decision was made to lay a living creature which would come to this place first into the foundation of the tower. A girl with buckets on a shoulder yoke came going to the Pochaina River to get water. And she was buried together with the buckets and the shoulder yoke there.
The surface of the curtain wall bears marks of numerous mendings of XVIII—XIX centuries; with that, the rows of the brickwork are very uneven, moreover, in the center of the curtain wall they are slant, at different angles. Today’s horizon of the soil in this section is significantly lower than the ancient one: up to 1.5-2 meters, so the foundation of the wall in some places lies higher than the foundation of a boulevard running along it.
The Northern Tower is located at the north-western corner of the mountain top section of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin and received its name at a later time because of its geographic location. All the documents of XVII century call the tower either Ilyinskaya or Naugolnaya (meaning “a corner one”). The name Ilyinskaya originates from a church of Ilyia located on the other side of Pochainsky ravine, which, according to the legend, was allegedly built by Nizhny Novgorod’s dwellers on the site where the leader of Nogais was killed during a siege of Nizhny Novgorod in 1505.
The clock tower is located on the summit of the Kremlin hill by a bank slope of the Volga. It is the only one of the Nizhny Novgorod’s towers located on the corner with its body mostly within the Kremlin walls; therefore, since early times it did not play an important military role.
The tower received its name from the clock that was in a special wooden facility on top — “a clock cabin.” Because of that the mountain, on which the tower is located, also bears the word clock in its name. The clockworks was set up in the tower, as the documents say, after its construction, since it was in a wooden attic. The works of the tower clock struck the hours automatically as early as in XVII century.
The curtain wall adjoining the tower by big steps descends down a steep mountain to the Ivanovskaya tower and has a length of 115 meters, while the difference of marks is up to 40 meters at the opposite ends. This section of the wall is very scenic and admirable because of its extreme boldness of the engineering solution of the most complicated task — creating a stable construction in the conditions when soil is subject to landslides.