Vodovzvodnaya Tower

The Vodovzvodnaya Tower closes off the southwestern corner of the Moscow Kremlin, at the point where the fortress wall turns along the Kremlin Embankment toward the Alexander Garden. It is one of the oldest and most recognizable towers of the fortress: its silhouette, topped with a ruby star, can be seen from the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge and the embankment. Originally the structure served a purely defensive role, and it acquired its present appearance and name thanks to a 17th-century engineering innovation.

The tower was built in 1488 during the large-scale rebuilding of the Kremlin's southern walls in brick — the works were led by the Italian architect Pietro Antonio Solari, while the corner tower itself was built by master Antonio Gilardi, known in the chronicles as Anton Fryazin. Originally the structure was called the Sviblova Tower, after the boyar family whose estate adjoined it on the Kremlin side. Together with the Taynitskaya and Beklemishevskaya towers, it closed a triangle of fortifications at the point where the Neglinnaya River flows into the Moskva River, and the thickness of its walls reached three meters.

The tower received its modern name in 1633, when master Christopher Galloway installed a water-lifting mechanism inside it: water from a well was raised into a lead reservoir and distributed by pipes to the Kremlin's palaces and gardens — this was Moscow's first pressurized water supply system. A tall tent-roof with a weathervane was added above the tower in the 1680s, along with the other Kremlin towers. Today the height of the structure up to the star is 57.7 meters, and including the star, 61.25 meters.

In 1805 the dilapidated tower was dismantled, and a year later rebuilt anew on the previous foundation. As early as 1812, the French army retreating from Moscow blew up the structure — leaving only ruins. Its restoration in 1817–1819 was carried out by architect Osip Bove, who altered some of the decorative finishing: the walls were rusticated, and the loopholes were replaced with round and semicircular windows. Another restoration took place in 1868, giving the tower the appearance it retains to this day. In place of the eagle that had crowned the tower before the Revolution, a ruby star with a wingspan of three meters — the smallest among the Kremlin's stars — was installed on the spire in 1937.

In 1973–1981, specialists under the direction of architects Alexei Vorobyov and Alexei Khamtsov renewed the white-stone decoration and replaced the tiles on the tent-roof with copper sheeting, while the masonry was cleaned and treated with a water-repellent compound. Since December 1990, the tower, as part of the Kremlin ensemble, has been included in the UNESCO World Heritage list, and since 1991 its image has been placed on the inside cover of the Russian citizen's passport. The Kremlin stars are regularly inspected and serviced: damage is most often related to weather conditions, including lightning strikes.

The Vodovzvodnaya Tower remains a symbol of Moscow's engineering history: it was here that the city's first pressurized water supply system appeared, and the structure itself survived destruction and restoration, retaining its status as one of the Kremlin's architectural dominants. Today it forms part of an image familiar to millions of people from its depiction on the country's official documents.