Resurrection Gate

The Resurrection Gate is a pair of passage arches from the former Kitai-gorod fortress wall, set between the building of the City Duma and the State Historical Museum. Also known as the Iberian Gate, it has twice disappeared from Moscow's map and twice been rebuilt, remaining one of the most recognizable entrances to Red Square from the direction of Tverskaya Street.

The first gate, then called the Neglinnensky Gate, was built in 1535–1538 on the bank of the Neglinnaya River to a design by the architect Petrok Maly, as part of the defensive Kitai-gorod fortress. Through it townspeople reached the trading rows from the city's main street, and it was through this very passage that the militia of Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky entered the Kremlin in 1612. The name Iberian became attached later, after a chapel was built by the gate in 1669 to receive the miracle-working icon of the Mother of God brought from Mount Athos.

In 1680, by decree of Tsar Fyodor Alekseyevich, the structure was rebuilt anew, with enlarged upper chambers, and topped with two tent-roofed towers bearing double-headed eagles. The lower tier retained the machicolations of the earlier fortress, while the upper tier was decorated with window surrounds, balustrades and carved half-columns. Icons were placed above the passageways, and a niche was set into the wall for a clock mechanism — the tower-gate combined its defensive origins with the representative appearance of a ceremonial entrance to the city's trading center.

The ensemble's fate changed dramatically in the Soviet era: in 1929 the Iberian Chapel was demolished to make way for a sculpture of a worker, and two years later, by Joseph Stalin's personal order, the gate itself was dismantled — it obstructed the simultaneous passage of demonstrators' columns onto Red Square during festive processions. The demolition was carried out without proper architectural oversight, with only a schematic survey of the structure managing to be made.

The opportunity to restore the monument arose by chance: in 1988, while repairing utility lines in Historical Passage, workers came upon the gate's foundation, allowing archaeologists to study the 17th-century masonry and earlier cultural layers. In 1994–1995 the gate and chapel were recreated under the direction of restoration architect Oleg Zhurin, in the style of the late 17th and 18th centuries respectively, and a new copy of the Iberian icon for the chapel was painted by an icon painter from Mount Athos.

Today the Resurrection Gate has been placed under the management of the State Historical Museum and again serves as a pedestrian entrance to Red Square, though heavy military parade equipment no longer passes through it on both sides of the museum building as it once did. The ensemble remains one of the clearest examples of the scholarly restoration of lost monuments of Moscow architecture in the 20th century.