Spasskaya Tower

The Spasskaya Tower is the central gate tower in the Kremlin wall facing Red Square, recognizable to nearly every resident of the country. It was built in 1491 under the direction of the Italian architect Pietro Antonio Solari, and the tower received its current tiered Gothic-style top in the 1620s thanks to the English master Christopher Galloway. At the top of the structure are the famous chiming clock, and since 1937 the tower has been crowned with a glowing ruby star.

The gate was originally called the Frolovsky Gate, after the nearby Church of Frol and Lavr, which was demolished when the area around the fortress was cleared by order of Ivan III. The current name was fixed by decree of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in 1658, in memory of the solemn reception of the miracle-working Icon of the Savior Not Made by Hands, which was carried into the Kremlin through this very gate. The building itself was constructed by Solari on the site of an older Frolovsky tower dating from the time of Dmitry Donskoy, leaving commemorative white-stone tablets with inscriptions in Latin and Church Slavonic on either side of the gateway.

In 1624–1625, the English architect Christopher Galloway, together with the Russian master Bazhen Ogurtsov, built above the tower's main cube a multi-tiered Gothic superstructure with arches, statues, and an octagonal tent roof — in composition, the structure resembled Brussels' town hall. The sculptures on the tower were originally nude, which led to their being dressed in specially sewn caftans, and they were subsequently damaged and restored several times during the fires of the 17th century. The tower's height, including the star, reaches 71 meters, and its structure comprises ten tiers of brickwork reinforced with stone buttresses.

The Spasskaya Tower has repeatedly suffered from fires and rebuilding: the fire of 1737 destroyed the roof and damaged the clock, and the bells crashed through the vaults as they fell. Under Peter I, a guardhouse and fortifications against a possible Swedish attack were built beside the gate, and the clock mechanism was replaced more than once — first with a Dutch mechanism in 1706, and then several more times over the following centuries. Before the revolution, the tower's top was adorned with a gilded double-headed eagle; the last such eagle, dating from 1912, was replaced in 1937 with a glowing five-pointed star with an independent lighting system of five kilowatts per lamp.

After the collapse of the USSR, proposals were repeatedly made to return the imperial eagle to the tower, but the Kremlin administration has confirmed that the ruby star will remain in its place, and only the technical lighting equipment is subject to renewal. The image of the Spasskaya Tower with its chiming clock has long served as an official emblem, used on medals, badges, and various symbols of the Soviet and Russian capital.

Today the Spasskaya Tower remains an active gate of the Kremlin and the main high-rise landmark of Red Square: the New Year is greeted to the chime of its clock, and the structure continues to be regarded as one of the most important monuments of Russian fortification architecture of the late 15th century.