Ivangorod Fortress
Interesting facts
- In 1496, just four years after it was built, a Swedish force of about 5,000 men on 70 ships stormed the fortress in no more than seven hours.
- The fortress has eleven towers with names such as the Alarm Tower, the Powder Tower, the Well Tower and the Long-Necked Tower.
- It reached its final shape in 1558, when an earthen rampart called the Boyar Bank completed nearly seven decades of expansion.
- The Treaty of Teusina returned Ivangorod to Russia in 1595, and the Treaty of Stolbovo handed it back to Sweden in 1617.
- In 1920 and 1921 the fortress served as a transit camp for prisoners of war being repatriated after the First World War.
- Restoration from 1964 to 1974 was led by the Estonian architect Henno Potti.
- The fortress stands about twelve versts, roughly 13 kilometres, upstream from where the Narva flows into the Gulf of Finland.
Why it is worth it
Few places on earth stage a medieval standoff as literally as the Narva River. On its west bank stands Hermann Castle in Estonia; on the east bank, barely a stone's throw away, rises Ivangorod Fortress in Russia. Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow had it raised in a single summer in 1492, on a hill called Maiden's Mount, as a deliberate answer to the knights across the water and as a claim on Muscovy's route to the Baltic. The town that grew up around it still carries his name.
The first fort was small and strictly square, with walls about 14 metres tall. It proved too weak, and within a few years Muscovite commanders added a much larger rectangular enclosure with round corner towers, known as the Great Boyar Town; in 1507 new walls followed the edge of the hill right down to the river. The result is an unusually layered complex that grew outward rather than being rebuilt in place. Ivangorod changed hands again and again: the Swedes held it from 1581, lost it, took it back after a six-month siege in 1612, and kept it until Peter the Great's army captured it in 1704. Between the world wars it belonged to Estonia; in the Second World War German forces used it for prisoner-of-war camps and blew up six corner towers and long sections of wall as they withdrew in 1944.
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.
Getting there
The fortress stands on the Russian bank directly opposite Narva, Estonia, about 1 km away across the Friendship Bridge. Ivangorod lies inside Russia's border zone, where entry is by passport or special permit. The nearest airport listed is Pskov (PKV), about 178 km away; most travellers on the Russian side come via St Petersburg.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Ivangorod Fortress is a castle in Ivangorod, Leningrad Oblast, Russia. It was built in the 15th century. It is located on the east bank of the Narva River, which currently forms the international border between Russia and Estonia, across from the city of Narva in Estonia.
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