Tsar Tower

The architect is unknown. The height is 16.7 metres (about 55 ft) high, including the weather vane.

This is the youngest and smallest of the Kremlin towers. It owes its name to the legend that the tsars, Ivan the Terrible in particular, liked standing up here to watch the bouts of fisticuffs below (there is no documentary proof of these legends). Originally the tower was made of wood in the form of a simple turret. It can be seen clearly on early seventeenth-century drawings of the Kremlin. The present stone tower is a typical Russian structure of the seventeenth century: the tent roof on four melon-shaped posts which stand on a kind of pedestal, the hanging pendants between the posts, the white-stone pinnacles and bolsters which pick out the facets of the tent roof topped by a gilded weather vane.

The tower has two tiers. The lower one, used for walking along the wall, is arched. The upper one with a platform used to contain a bell.