Zachatyevskaya Tower (also known as Zachatskaya and Zhivonosnovskaya) is a tower of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, located at its southwestern corner on the bank of the Volga. It was erected between 1500 and 1514, simultaneously with the Kremlin's surviving walls. Around 1750 it was displaced by a landslide and collapsed; for more than two centuries it existed only as earthen embankments. In 2012 it was reconstructed from scratch — the only one of the Kremlin's thirteen towers whose restoration had not been completed during the mid-twentieth-century conservation works.[1][2]
Construction History and Design
The tower was built simultaneously with the rest of the Kremlin's fortifications, in red brick, construction having begun in 1500 with the participation of Pietro Francesco (Pyotr Fryazin) (Pyotr Fryazin).[4] It took its name from the nearby Zachatyevsky convent — founded on the bank of the Volga beneath the Kremlin hill by order of the wife of Prince Andrey Konstantinovich and named in honor of the Conception of the Holy Martyr Anna. This convent was revived in 2004 under the name Krestovozdvizhensky.[1] In seventeenth-century archival documents the tower is referred to as the White "four-sided" tower, indicating that white-stone elements were incorporated into the masonry alongside brick. The third name — Zhivonosnovskaya — derives from a nearby Zhivonosny spring (Life-giving spring) to which the healing of eye ailments was attributed.[1]
The tower was a square, two-tiered structure crowned with a plank roof, and it did not rise above the height of the fortress walls. It served as a gateway tower: through its gates one could descend to the Volga. Due to its deteriorating condition, as early as 1622 the gates were no longer in use and had been "blocked with an upright palisade".[1] The lower hillside section was subject to constant landslides; the clay soil, loose subsoil, and groundwater and surface water combined to cause deformation of the tower and the walls adjoining it.[2]
Destruction and Loss
Around 1750 the tower was displaced by a landslide toward the Volga and collapsed. In the eighteenth century, during the reign of Catherine II, under the first provincial architect Yakov Ananyin, the northern walls of the Kremlin, as well as Zachatyevskaya and Borisoglebskaya Tower of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin and replaced with lower walls.[2] The remains of Zachatyevskaya Tower were taken apart, and in their place a "Descent to the Life-giving Spring" was constructed — small gates flanked by two guardhouses. In the 1830s this descent, having been shifted by another landslide, was filled in.[1]
Excavations carried out in the 1960s revealed that the tower's masonry mass had shifted toward the river by 4.5 meters — presumably in the late seventeenth or first half of the eighteenth century; this fact had not been recorded in any documents.[2] Authentic fragments of the tower were not discovered until 1961, when the eighteenth-century masonry concealing them collapsed, revealing the top of a vaulted passage 110 cm wide leading from the tower into a firing embrasure (pechoura) within the thickness of the fortress wall, and above it several white-stone steps. Five steps of the stone staircase survived, each 34–36 cm high and 27 cm wide, along with the brick facing of the wall and the remains of a sloping vault.[2]
Restoration and Reconstruction
In 1949 a decree on the restoration of the Kremlin was adopted. The Nizhny Novgorod architect Agafonov, having analyzed the cleared fragments and sixteenth-century engravings, reconstructed the tower's historical appearance in drawings and put forward the hypothesis that it Nikolskaya Tower of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin. Zachatyevskaya proved to be the only one of the thirteen towers that could not be restored during his lifetime.[1][2] His daughter Irina Svyatoslavovna Agafonova continued her father's work.[2]
The tower was reconstructed in 2012. The works formed part of a large-scale program to improve the Kremlin ensemble in anticipation of Celebration of the 800th Anniversary of the Founding of Nizhny Novgorod. A museum opened within the walls of the reconstructed tower.[1][2]
Legends
The excavation pit beneath the tower is associated with Urban Legends in the foundations of the masonry. According to the legend, during the construction of the Kremlin the Italian assistant architect Giovano Tatti (nicknamed Zhyovany Tat', meaning "Chewed Thief") and the Novgorod brigand Danila Volkhovets both fell in love with the same girl — a townsperson named Nastasya. The rivals killed each other during a fight at the laying ceremony for Zachatyevskaya and Belaya towers, and the voivode Volynets ordered their bodies to be buried in the excavation pits beneath the towers.[4] A similar story is attributed to the neighboring Belaya Tower. Local Historians of Nizhny Novgorod to the activities of Pavel Melnikov-Pechersky, who in 1845 headed the unofficial section of the Nizhny Novgorod Provincial News and actively filled the newspaper with local history material, at times taking considerable liberties with historical fact.[4]
Sources
- nsportal.ru — Zachatyevskaya Tower of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin: from construction to full restoration — Educational Social Network
- book-hall.ru — Zachatskaya (Zachatyevskaya) Tower of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin / Centralized Library System of Kanavinsky District (archive)
- nn.aif.ru — Legends of the old fortress. What secrets do the walls of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin hold? (archive)
- travel.yandex.ru