The Most Impressive Fortresses in Russia
8 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most impressive fortresses in Russia are Ivangorod Fortress, Pskov Krom and Peter and Paul Fortress. The list covers 8 fortresses. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Russia's fortresses grew out of a vast, open land with few natural barriers. Towns protected themselves with kremlins, walled citadels that held the cathedral, the ruler's residence and the town's stores, first in timber and later in brick and stone. As Russia expanded, fortresses moved with its frontiers: to the Baltic, along the Volga, across the Urals into Siberia and down to the Caspian, so the country's strongholds span many centuries and traditions.
The Moscow Kremlin, whose red brick walls and towers were rebuilt in the late fifteenth century with the help of Italian architects, remains the most famous of them. Ivangorod Fortress, founded in 1492 on the Narva River, faces the Hermann Castle of Narva across the water. The Peter and Paul Fortress, founded by Peter the Great in 1703, marks the birth of St. Petersburg, and its cathedral holds the tombs of most Russian emperors.
Farther east and south, the forms change. The Kazan Kremlin combines Russian walls and churches with the Qolşärif Mosque and the leaning Söyembikä Tower. The Tobolsk Kremlin, on a high bluff above the Irtysh River, is the only stone kremlin in Siberia. In Derbent, the Naryn-Kala citadel was built by the Sasanian Persians around the sixth century, with long walls that once ran down to the Caspian Sea. The Rostov Kremlin, built in the seventeenth century as a residence for the metropolitan, is a walled ensemble of churches and towers on the shore of Lake Nero.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ivangorod Fortress | Fortress | |
| 2 | Pskov Krom | Fortress | |
| 3 | Peter and Paul Fortress | Fort | ✓ |
| 4 | Qazan Kremlin | Fortress | ✓ |
| 5 | Kremlin | Fortress | ✓ |
| 6 | Tobolsk Kremlin | Fortress | |
| 7 | Rostov Kremlin | Fortress | |
| 8 | Naryn Castle | Fortress |
01 Ivangorod Fortress
Russia · 2.7 km from Narva59.375° N 28.208° E
Photographer: Mosbatho · CC BY 4.0 Restoration began in the 1960s under Estonian specialists and continued with Russian teams from 1985; the fortress has been open to visitors since 1987, and a joint Estonian–Russian project in the 2010s conserved the original walls of 1492 and a seventeenth-century powder store. Inside the walls are the churches of the Assumption (1496) and St Nicholas, and a museum with paintings by Ivan Bilibin, archaeological finds and displays on the Livonian and Great Northern Wars. The real spectacle, though, is the view: two rival fortresses staring at each other across a border river that has divided powers for more than five centuries.
Did you know? It reached its final shape in 1558, when an earthen rampart called the Boyar Bank completed nearly seven decades of expansion.
02 Pskov Krom
Russia · 1 km from Pskov57.821° N 28.329° E
Alexxx1979 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Above the walls rises the Trinity Cathedral, completed in 1699 as the fourth church on this spot, and nearby stand the Prikaznye Palaty of the 1690s, the only surviving 17th-century civil building in the kremlin. Much of the complex was in ruins by the 20th century and was restored from 1952 onwards; in 2010 a fire destroyed the tent roofs of the Vlasyevskaya and Rybnitskaya towers. Today the Krom is part of the Pskov Museum-Reserve. Visitors can walk the grounds, view the excavated remains of medieval Pskov in Dovmont's Town and look out over the meeting of the two rivers.
03 Peter and Paul Fortress
Russia · 1 km from Saint Petersburg59.950° N 30.317° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by OlgaSadrova from Pixabay At its centre is the Peter and Paul Cathedral (1712–1733), whose gilded spire topped by an angel rises to 122.5 metres and remains a signature of the skyline. The cathedral is the burial place of the Romanov imperial family, with a separate Grand Ducal burial vault beside it. Other sights include the Trubetskoy Bastion prison cells, the Commandant's House, the Boat House and the working Saint Petersburg Mint. Since 1873 a signal gun has been fired from the Naryshkin Bastion every day at noon. On the Neva side, between the Naryshkin and Trubetskoy bastions, a narrow beach under the granite walls is a favourite spot for sunbathing from the first warm days of spring — swimming is not allowed.
Did you know? Nikolai Chernyshevsky wrote his influential novel What Is to Be Done? while held in the fortress in the early 1860s.
04 Qazan Kremlin
Russia · 5.2 km from Kazan55.797° N 49.107° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by 6649312 from Pixabay That pairing of a great mosque and an Orthodox cathedral inside one fortress is what makes the Kazan Kremlin unusual,. UNESCO inscribed the Kazan Kremlin as a World Heritage Site in 2000.
Did you know? The cathedral's five-tier bell tower was built to resemble Moscow's Ivan the Great Bell Tower, but was pulled down by the Soviets in 1930.
05 Kremlin
Russia · 0.4 km from Moscow55.752° N 37.618° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by dondelord from Pixabay The Kremlin still marks the centre of Moscow, the Russian capital. Red Square and St Basil's Cathedral lie against its eastern wall, and the Alexander Garden follows the western side. The complex remains the working seat of the Russian presidency, so visitors see only the museum areas.
Did you know? In the Second World War the Kremlin was disguised from the air: towers repainted, roofs coloured rusty brown, and painted fabric stretched over the gardens.
06 Tobolsk Kremlin
Russia · 0.7 km from Tobolsk58.199° N 68.253° E
Óðinn · CC BY-SA 2.5 ca Tobolsk below the kremlin keeps the feel of an old provincial capital. Exiled Decembrists lived here after the rising of 1825, the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev was born in the town, and after his abdication in 1917 Nicholas II and his family were held for several months in the Governor's Mansion before being moved to Yekaterinburg. The kremlin has been protected as a historical and architectural museum-reserve since 1961.
Did you know? To stop the river eating away the kremlin hill, the bed of the Tobol was shifted about two versts, roughly two kilometres, to the south.
07 Rostov Kremlin
Russia57.185° N 39.417° E
Image by Tanya50 from Pixabay The ensemble fell into neglect after the see moved to Yaroslavl in the 1780s, and was saved by Rostov merchants, among them Andrei Titov and Ivan Shlyakov, who founded a museum of church antiquities here in 1883. A tornado on 24 August 1953 tore off domes and roofs; the restoration that followed, led by Vladimir Banige and largely complete by 1957, set the standard for scientific conservation of Russian monuments. Film audiences know the walls as sixteenth-century Moscow from Leonid Gaidai's 1973 comedy Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession.
Did you know? The walls betray their peaceful purpose: wide gates, towers without low-level loopholes, and decorative framed windows where fighting embrasures should be.
08 Naryn Castle
Russia · 0.6 km from Derbent42.053° N 48.274° E
Сулим Кудусов · CC BY-SA 3.0 Derbent, in the Republic of Dagestan, is regarded as the oldest city in Russia and its southernmost. Its name comes from Persian words for a gate or barrier, and after the Arab conquest in the seventh century it became known as Bab al-Abwab, the "Gate of Gates". The Juma Mosque in the old town is considered the oldest mosque in Russia. Arabs, Persians, local khans and finally the Russian Empire, which took the city in the early nineteenth century, all held the citadel in turn.
Did you know? One reading of the name Naryn-Kala from Middle Persian is Sunny Fortress.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most impressive fortresses in Russia?
- On our list, Ivangorod Fortress ranks first, followed by Pskov Krom and Peter and Paul Fortress.
- What is a kremlin?
- A kremlin is a fortified central complex in a Russian city, usually containing churches, palaces and administrative buildings. Moscow's is the best known, but many old Russian towns, such as Kazan, Rostov and Tobolsk, have their own.
- How old is the fortress of Derbent?
- The citadel of Naryn-Kala and the city walls of Derbent were built by the Sasanian Persian Empire, mainly in the sixth century, to guard the narrow passage between the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea.
- Who is buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress?
- The Peter and Paul Cathedral inside the fortress holds the tombs of almost all Russian emperors and empresses from Peter the Great onwards. The remains of Nicholas II and his family were reburied there in 1998.
- How many fortresses are on this list in Russia?
- The list covers 8 fortresses.