March 01, 2010

Beneath Kremlin Walls

‘Twas ever thus, alas. Some people create masterpieces, only for others to disfigure them. But at some point a third party appeared in this process: restorers, or specialists who return the original beauty to works of art that have suffered at the hands of people and time.

The history of the Russian restoration movement began in the Moscow Kremlin. In 1783, the wise decision was taken to restore the southern wall of the fortress, which had been dismantled to make way for a palace that was never built. And not just to restore it any old how, but rather to its “original form.”

In recent years, the Kremlin has seen restoration and research work on an unprecedented scale. Such work has produced sensational results and restored the original appearance of a large number of outstanding works from the Russian middle ages. It might seem that the Kremlin’s world-famous — even proverbial — architecture had been studied exhaustively. But because the Kremlin was a “forbidden city” for 70 years, its most important treasures have remained terra incognita for several generations of historians.

The Soviet government moved into the Kremlin in 1918. It remained closed to visitors from the 1930s until the 1960s, and to serious restoration and archeological research for much longer. Only in 1999 did experts begin to study one of the most important constructions in the history of ancient Russian architecture: the Grand Prince’s Palace (1499-1508).

That same year, research work began on another, even more ancient building, known as the Underground Chambers of the Treasury Court. Also studied and restored were the Patriarch’s Palace and the Poteshny Palace, the richest civilian buildings in 17th-century Russia. Continuing restoration work on the Cathedral of the Annunciation has thrown light on the very early history of this wonderful building.

All of these efforts have been carried out by the highly qualified specialists of the Central Scientific Restoration Project Workshops. The discoveries made during these works have turned scholarly knowledge of the history of the Kremlin — and the history of Russian architecture as a whole — on its head.

The Grand Prince’s Bedchambers

Construction work on the stone Grand Prince’s Palace was begun in 1499, led by the Italian architect Aloisio da Caresano. The palace comprised a chain of numerous basements that were used for housekeeping directly below state rooms and living quarters. The buildings were connected by open passageways, and had numerous stone porches. These were decorated both on the inside and outside by carved stonework, gilded in places, in the style of the early Renaissance. Most of the ancient wooden palace was dismantled in the 1830s. Only a three-storey building — in the vaults of which a new palace had been built for Tsar Mikhail Romanov in the 17th century — survived. The ancient part of the building was restored many times, and until recently the precise extent to which it had been preserved remained unclear.

Research in the 1990s established that the three-storey space was the surviving Bedchambers — in other words, the prince’s living quarters – and that the construction work was indeed Italian, with clear traces of Renaissance architecture, from the open arcades and terracotta decor of the facades to the wooden coffered ceilings in the living rooms. It provides the first known instance in Russia of the latter detail, which is characteristic of the European Renaissance (one of the best-known examples can be found at the Wawel Royal Castle in Krakow). After research and restoration of the interiors, the Italian masonry was carefully concealed behind panels faced with Italian tiles; the palace was also home to the Kremlin kitchens — a unique construction that remains closed to visitors.

The Poteshny Palace

The most striking building re-opened in recent years is the Poteshny Palace, which is part of a sumptuous 17th-century palace complex. Until recently, few visitors to the Kremlin paid much attention to the tall but unremarkable building by the Trinity Gate. Today there rises up a dramatic and startling construction crowned by a whole cluster of gilded cupolas — the chambers, built around 1651, of the boyar Ilya Dmitrevich Miloslavsky, father-in-law of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov. After its owner’s death in 1660, the palace passed to the treasury, and at the end of the 17th century it was home to tsarevnas and widowed tsaritsas. The palace gets its famous name from the performances that were staged here by the court theatre.*

The building consisted of an intricate set of two courtyards linked by a connecting arch. The four-story palace was crowned by a many-cupolaed domestic church, with a hanging apple garden on the roofs of the buildings. In the 19th century, the building was twice restored; scholars could only guess at its original appearance. However, in the early 2000s, the Federal Protective Service (i.e., the presidential bodyguard), which occupies the building, finally signed agreements with restorers. And once more a commonplace Kremlin miracle occurred: research turned a diversity of opinions about Russian architecture upside down.

Among the discoveries were a sumptuous carved frieze on the facades — including both real and imaginary animals, a mermaid and an equestrian competition with riders wearing European clothes — the many-hued painting of the building and decorative and constructive elements that also had a clearly European origin. Miloslavsky is known to have visited Holland and Germany, so it is possible that he may have brought the craftsmen from there. The most important discoveries were made in the interiors of the palace; unfortunately these were not part of the restoration zone.

“These are virtually the only palace interiors from the second half of the 17th century to have survived,” said Moscow Kremlin Museum deputy director Andrei Batalov. “The palace is a completely baroque construction. Some amazing things were discovered here — ornamental paintings on the walls and a unique coffered ceiling similar to the one discovered in the Bedchambers, only made out of white stone! If in the future the palace is turned into a museum, this would be a simply fabulous monument.”

Patriarch’s Palace

Investigation is continuing of the Patriarch’s Palace, which forms the northern side of Cathedral Square. Construction of this complex began in 1450, but most of the surviving buildings were built in the mid-17th century. In the 19th century, however, the building was subjected to a stylized restoration, with the result that it was possible only to guess at which parts were authentic and which were born of the fertile imagination of 19th-century architects.

Recent research has been made possible by the removal of the public toilet that had been located for several decades in the enormous ‘one-pillar chamber’ on the lower floor of the palace. (Finding a location for this essential tourist attraction has for some reason been extremely problematic. After the toilet was removed from the chamber, Cathedral Square was for some years decorated with a row of plastic outhouses. Now a more permanent facility — a formless plastic pavilion right in front of the Patriarch’s Palace — has been erected.) Along the way, the building has been studied extremely thoroughly. The building’s complex wooden structure has become clear. It was confirmed that part of the decoration of the northern elevation had been displaced in 1980 as part of the hurried preparation of the Kremlin for Olympics ceremonies. It was also discovered that the original 15th-century space — thought to have been lost by the 19th century at the latest — had been beautifully preserved until the 1960s, only to be taken down during the construction of the Palace of Congresses (it was mistakenly assumed to be a later addition).

Visually, the most striking discovery made by the restorers was a highly complex knot of staircases linking together several wings of the palace built at different times. This ornate agglomeration comprised of winding intramural staircases leading up and down, gloomy pantries, privies and cubbyholes for all sorts of domestic stuff. This knot made it possible to access any part of the building without going outside. At the start of the investigation, part of the premises was walled up and part cut off; in the 1960s it was planned to put in air-conditioning, but that idea was later dropped.

Investigation of the palace is still not finished; the next stage is the attic. It is not known what the original central section of the palace — between Patriarch Nikon’s private quarters and the palace’s church — was like. It is possible that the upper part of the Patriarch’s Palace could have been similar to that of the Poteshny Palace, with its exposed cupping-room and bell-tower.

Cathedral of the Annunciation

The house church of the great princes, with its nine cupolas, was built in several stages from the time of the Battle of Kulikovo (1380) to the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584). Explorations launched in 2000 have shed light on the earliest stages of the history of this remarkable building.

The ground floor built by Prince Dmitry Donskoy in the 14th century — the oldest surviving construction in the Kremlin — has been restored. Among the construction debris underneath the staircase were found fragments of decorative elements from a cathedral of 1416, most of which was destroyed during later reconstructions. Scholars have been able to partially piece together this broken mosaic and imagine the appearance of a building that disappeared more than 500 years ago. Among other finds were fragments of a fresco painted by the legendary icon-painter Andrei Rublyov. And since all works with a Rublyov connection are in a state of ruin, the fragments — untouched by alterations — that were discovered show the color-scheme that the painting had at the time of its creation.

But the most interesting discoveries were made in the cathedral’s south porch, which in point of fact was a covered walkway to the palace of Ivan the Terrible. This highly unusual architecture shows signs of a European influence about which very little had previously been known; specifically, Andrei Batalov has shown the link between the white-stone carvings of the porch and Dutch book decorations from the middle of the 16th century.

“This is the only piece of court architecture that has survived from the time of Ivan the Terrible,” said architect Georgy Yevdokimov. “From it we can see the highly ornate and complex structure of the lost ensemble; we have not worked it out fully yet, but we are trying. For example, the ancient appearance of the south porch, which at the time was still open to the elements, is becoming clear: the floors laid down in black and white triangular tiles, the red and white painted brickwork walls, the almost black vaulting and the white carving.”

The Treasury Court

The porch of the Cathedral of the Annunciation simultaneously played the role of a formal entrance to the Treasury Court — the princely depository to the east of the cathedral. The Treasury Court was built in the 1480s and demolished at the end of the 18th century. The Kremlin of today is as a whole only a memory of a formerly magnificent architectural ensemble. Half of it now is made up of squares and plazas, but in the Middle Ages there was only one square: Cathedral Square. All of today’s well-crafted open spaces were built-up blocks crowded with churches, boyars’ houses or monastery churches. One of the most sumptuous lost complexes was the Treasury Court. Thanks to the efforts of today’s restorers, this edifice, which disappeared more than 200 years ago, is once again casting its shadow onto the walls of the cathedral. A closer look from Cathedral Square reveals the traces of abutting arches and staircases belonging to a non-existent building, as well as a carved column-head dating back to the time of Ivan the Terrible, embedded in the wall.

These are not the only remnants of the Treasury Court; underground is preserved the imposing cellar of another wing built in 1485. This is the oldest civilian construction in the Kremlin, but researchers gained access to it for the first time only at the end of the 1990s (moreover, the hidden cellar had not even been mentioned in specialist literature in the 20th century). The cellar adjoins the Cathedral of the Archangel, which from the 14th to the 17th century was the resting place of the grand princes and subsequently the tsars. Russian tsaritsas were traditionally buried in the Kremlin’s Monastery of the Ascension, which was destroyed in 1928. At the time, museum workers manually moved 40 tons of stone sarcophaguses with the remnants of the princesses to the Cathedral of the Archangel; having smashed the arches of the cellar, they lowered them down on ropes into the depths of the Treasury Court. Until recently the sarcophaguses were strewn higgledy-piggledy along the wall of the basement, and only around the millennium was permission granted to restore the chamber (in the process another 15th-century walled-up room was discovered) and put the tombs there into good order.

Thanks to the efforts of the Kremlin’s chief archaeologist, Tatyana Panova, the bones were sorted out and cleaned up, and many previously unidentified burials were finally identified. They included the remains of the only grand princess to have been canonized — Dmitry Donskoy’s wife Yevdokia. At a ceremony in 2009, a reliquary containing her remains was transferred from the Underground Chamber to the sacrarium of the Cathedral of the Archangel.

Archaeology of the Kremlin

Archaeological research into the Kremlin in the Soviet period was highly arbitrary. No planned digs were carried out, and experts were only allowed to inspect earthworks or building works that were being carried out. Work carried out in closed-off areas frequently went entirely unannounced.

At the start of the 1970s, the Kremlin acquired its own archaeological service, and the presence of experts at any digging work became more or less compulsory. But this was not observed on a regular basis. For example, in 1988, scholars were only alerted to secret construction works near the Petrovskaya Tower by trucks departing the site loaded with soil. However, in recent years archaeologists have finally been able to find a common language with the Kremlin authorities, and no less importantly with the workers who do the excavations. (A rusty piece of iron found by chance in a trench might before have been thrown onto the trash-heap; instead it was handed over to archaeologists for identification. It turned out to be a 12th-century sword bearing the insignia of the German armorer Tsitselin.)

Regardless of the numerous limitations imposed by the regimented use of the territory, over the course of the past 70 years a massive amount of evidence has accumulated in the archives regarding the internal configuration of Borovitsky Hill, as Kremlin Hill used to be known. This includes materials from archaeological digs and chance finds, as well as data obtained from the drilling of boreholes. In all, some 1,100 reference points were established, a disorderly jumble of fragments of a broken mosaic.

Finally, the time came to make sense of the knowledge that had been accumulated. Some years ago, Panova defended her doctoral dissertation, in which she pieced together all of these shards into a single picture that significantly altered ideas about the ancient stages of Moscow’s development. An important aspect was the reconstruction of the ancient contours and landscape of Borovitsky Hill. She was thereby able to unpick the history of the Kremlin fortifications, and to make another set of surprising discoveries.

The first traces of human settlement on the hill can be dated to the early Iron Age (just shy of 3,000 years ago). Remnants were found of two small settlements of the so-called Dyakovo culture. The best-preserved fragments — a small ditch and shards of pottery and burnt hearth-stones — were discovered right under the floor of the Cathedral of the Archangel. There is every reason to belief that this was a pagan holy site (it has been shown that even after the advent of Christianity the site remained undeveloped — a sacred grove grew here until the 14th century).

The first fortress appeared on Borovitsky Hill in the 12th century, with the arrival of the Kievan Prince Yury Dolgoruky. It was a small, oval-shaped fortification with a single set of gates located not on the promontory of the hill, as is commonly thought, but on the site of the current Palace of Congresses, along the road from Vladimir to Smolensk, which crossed the hill. But the fortress was not a town in the proper sense; the citadel served as a resting place for the prince’s troops (the detachment was apparently quite large and voracious — a pathway paved with bovine jawbones has been found alongside the Tsar Cannon). In 1156, Dolgoruky built a more impressive fortress out of pinewood to strengthen the road to Vladimir; two of its entrances were protected by defensive earthworks — fortifications before the town gates. (The Tsitselin sword was found in one of them, suggesting it was lost during an attempt to storm the town.) But this was still not a town, but rather a mustering point for troops. Thus, for all its broad spaces, inside the fortress was all but empty. In it were just three or four living blocks and the prince’s court on the site of the current Presidential Residence by the Savior Gate (it was here, in the 1980s, that they found two celebrated hoards of princely treasure buried before the Mongol sack of Moscow in 1238).

At the start of the 14th century, Moscow could already confidently be called a town. In 1339, Ivan Kalita built a new wooden fortress to replace the old one, which had burned down, equipping it with two stockades to protect the gates. Reconstructing the layout of the fortress appears much more difficult than previous speculative plans of the town’s development, but in point of fact such difficulties are the norm for their time — the absence of specialized building techniques meant the contours of the town closely followed those of the landscape. The white stone Kremlin of Dmitry Donskoy was built on the foundations of this expanded fortification later, in 1367. Historians have argued for years over where these walls stood and what they looked like, while archaeologists at the same time have excavated a whole collection of fragments, buried in places as far down as five meters!

A number of interesting points have been cleared up regarding the 15th-century fortress that survives to the present day. For example, the ditch on Red Square; it turns out that it was made up of separate sectors divided by dykes in order to let the water out during the winter. There were also barrages to contain the Neglinka River, and the dammed river spilled over into a proper lake; the Alexander Garden was all under water, and above the Kutafey Tower it flooded almost the entirety of Manezhnaya Square. It is for this reason that no 16th-century stratum has been found on the square; it has been replaced by pond debris — a densely packed layer of dead tadpoles and other swamp rubbish.

“Today the Kremlin administration makes great efforts to keep us onside, as it is also interested in all of this,” Panova said. “But they can only do so much. Only recently the commandant himself said: ‘Let’s try digging somewhere else.’ I chose several spots that seemed interesting to me, and showed them to him — but nothing came of it. This spot was impossible, that spot had been impossible for years, while here the president travels to work every day. Organizing a research range in the Kremlin in the same way as in Ryazan or Kherson is, of course, out of the question; most work in the future will take the form of observations of individual locations. But we now have a much better idea of what we are looking for, and where to look for it.”

The Lower Garden

In the summer of 2007, on the fringe of the Kremlin — the Lower Garden, running down the side of the hill towards the Moscow River — large-scale digs were undertaken for the first time; they revealed a beautifully preserved street dating from the 15th or 16th century. In the damp soil of the former floodplain, the domestic basements of a whole row of wooden houses had been preserved intact — the lower crown of the walls, the inter-storey coverings and staircases leading down from the first-floor premises, which were not preserved. In the underground section of one house a tub of pickled mushrooms was found. In another basement they discovered seven charred bodies — a whole family that likely died in the fire of 1493. Paradoxical as it may sound, in Russia — which was a country of wooden towns right up until the 18th century — no wooden residences dating from the pre-Petrine era have survived above ground.

The reason for the works on the edge of the Kremlin was the construction of a technical edifice; in other words, the buildings that were discovered were doomed. Only one log structure was transferred to the museum reserves; the remainder was bulldozed. The Kremlin has lots of places where thorough archaeology involving scraping around with trowels is not necessary, as everything has long since been dug up and moved elsewhere. But there are also places such as the fringe where nothing has been built for the past 200 years, and where the medieval stratum is preserved almost entirely untouched. It might seem that all this territory should be declared a reserve and turned into a gigantic museum complex. But as long as the Kremlin remains the seat of government, the appearance of such technical edifices is unavoidable, and the fringe will remain an extremely convenient place for this.

“If you take the position that the destruction of the buildings discovered is unacceptable, then clearly an alternative is needed,” said archaeologist Igor Kondratyev. “Unfortunately, preserving the wooden constructions that have been liberated from the earth in the form that we see them in photographs is extremely difficult. Russia has no examples of turning archaeological fragments of wooden constructions into a museum in situ, and they are a rarity in Europe as well. So in this case the main question is as follows: is it worth excavating the fringe while we have no idea about how to preserve it? Eventually this idea will suggest itself — and the subterranean wilds of the Kremlin will have more than enough for those who want to turn them into a museum.” RL

* The Russian adjective потешный derives from потеха, a form of popular entertainment.

The oldest archaelogical find on Borovitsky Hill dates to the second millennium B.C.E.

The first stone church in the Kremlin was the Church of the Savior in the Forest (1380).

The last time the walls of the Kremlin were breached was in 1812, when Napoleon occupied Moscow

and ordered a portion of the wall destroyed.

March 01, 2010

Beneath Kremlin Walls

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