Armoury Chamber

The Armoury Chamber is one of Russia's oldest treasure museums, part of the Grand Kremlin Palace complex, holding a unique collection of regalia, ceremonial weapons and works of decorative art belonging to Russian sovereigns. Today its exhibition presents more than four thousand items created between the 12th and early 20th centuries, and since 1960 the museum has structurally been part of the Moscow Kremlin Museums.

The treasury's collection began forming in the 14th century as the private treasury of the Moscow grand princes, and by 1484 a special building with a pyramid-shaped roof was constructed for it between the Cathedral of the Archangel and the Cathedral of the Annunciation — thus the Treasury Yard (Kazyonny Dvor) came into being, ceasing to be the ruler's personal property and becoming a state treasury. The separate name "Armoury Chamber" was fixed to the department responsible for the tsar's weapons as early as the beginning of the 16th century, under Grand Prince Vasily III, who established the special office of oruzhnichy (master of arms).

In 1720, Peter I united the scattered palace workshops and treasury chambers — the Tsarina's Workshop, the Stable Treasury, and the treasures of the Patriarchal Sacristy — into a single department under one common name, marking the beginning of the storehouse's transformation into a museum institution. The fire of 1737 destroyed part of the collection of weapons and banners from the Petrine era, and the surviving valuables were temporarily moved to the Terem Palace. In 1806, Alexander I established a court museum based on the collection, and for it the architect Ivan Yegotov built a building on Senate Square, which opened to the nobility and merchant public in 1813–1814.

The museum's present building was erected in 1851 to a design by Konstantin Ton on the site of the former Stable Department, as part of the Grand Kremlin Palace ensemble. The upper floor is decorated with white-stone carved columns and window surrounds in the spirit of pre-Petrine architecture, while the façades feature marble medallions with portraits of sovereigns, carved by the sculptor Fedot Shubin back in the 1770s for another, now-lost palace ensemble. Ton conceived the ceremonial enfilade of the second floor as a continuation of the halls of the Grand Kremlin Palace, vividly demonstrating both the wealth of the sovereign's treasury and the might of Russian arms.

After the 1917 Revolution, the museum's collection was enlarged with nationalized valuables from private collections and monastery sacristies across the country, and the museum itself became accessible to the general public. Today the exhibition includes collections of armor and weapons, gold and silver treasures, works of Kremlin and foreign workshops, fabrics and vestments, and the famous collection of antique carriages and ceremonial coaches of the Russian monarchs.

The Armoury Chamber remains one of the country's leading museums in terms of the number of authentic items of pre-Petrine Russian decorative and applied art, and it invariably features on the route of most tourist excursions around the Moscow Kremlin.