Leaning Tower of Nevyansk — clock tower
Ludvig14 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Leaning Tower of Nevyansk

  • 2 min read
  • 57.490° N 60.223° E

Interesting facts

  • The chiming clock was originally set to play 18 English melodies, the repertoire it carried from its London maker.
  • In the 19th century the chimes played the imperial anthem God Save the Tsar, replaced by a Soviet patriotic song in the late 1930s.
  • Since 1985 the bells have played the closing chorus from Glinka's opera Ivan Susanin.
  • According to one account, the tower was finished on 1 January 1725 as a memorial to Nikita Demidov, the dynasty's founder.
  • The walls taper dramatically with height, from about 1.8 metres thick at the base to roughly 30 centimetres at the top.
  • The steepest tilt, about 3 degrees 16 minutes, is in the lowest tier, while the upper tiers were built progressively straighter.
  • Its floors rest on cast-iron beams about 19 by 14.5 centimetres in section, an early use of iron framing in a masonry building.
  • The spire is crowned by a 25-kilogram weathervane bearing the Demidov coat of arms.
  • According to legend, Demidov secretly minted counterfeit coins in the assay laboratory inside the tower.
  • A popular story says the cellar was deliberately flooded to hide its secret work from inspectors, but modern specialists find no evidence for it.

Why it is worth it

In the centre of a small Urals town, a tall brick tower leans visibly to one side, while its upper tiers bend back towards the vertical in a gentle sabre curve. The Leaning Tower of Nevyansk, 57.5 metres high, was raised for the Demidovs, the iron-making dynasty that helped industrialise the Urals under Peter the Great. Nevyansk grew from an ironworks founded in 1700, which the tsar granted to Nikita Demidov together with vast tracts of land, and the tower became the family's emblem and the town's symbol, still shown on its coat of arms. The architect is unknown, and dates differ between accounts; most place construction in the 1720s, under Akinfiy Demidov.

The structure is a massive square base, about 9 metres a side with walls up to 2 metres thick, topped by three octagonal tiers with balconies and a spire. The lean has a likely explanation: the tower stands near the old shore of the factory pond, and the ground settled unevenly once two thirds of the base had been built. The builders compensated by tilting the upper parts the other way, which gave the tower its curve. The top deviates by about 1.85 metres. Local legend offers a darker story, in which Demidov had the architect thrown from the top so that he could never build anything finer, and the tower leaned the next morning.

Inside, nine levels have been interpreted in different ways: an office for Demidov's papers, an assay laboratory where soot in the flues contained traces of gold and silver, and an acoustic room in which a whisper in one corner can be heard clearly in the opposite one. The seventh and eighth floors hold a chiming clock made by the English bell-founder Richard Phelps in 1730, bought by Demidov for a sum said to exceed the cost of the tower itself; its bells still play a tune. The roof is built on cast-iron and wrought-iron framing well ahead of its time, and the spire carries a grounded metal rod that has been interpreted as a lightning conductor predating Benjamin Franklin's. The tower is protected as a monument of federal significance.

Getting there

The tower stands in the centre of Nevyansk, Sverdlovsk Oblast, on the Neyva River, about 97 km north of Yekaterinburg. Koltsovo Airport (SVX), serving Yekaterinburg, is about 90 km away in a straight line. Nevyansk station lies on the railway between Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Tagil.

Plan your visit

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On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Russia 73The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in Russia 6The Most Beautiful Clock Towers 7The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments 173

From the encyclopaedia

The Leaning Tower of Nevyansk is a tower built in the 18th century located within the town of Nevyansk, Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia. The construction was funded by the blacksmith and industrialist Nikita Demidov and later his son Akinfiy Demidov, a famous Russian manufacturer and associate of Peter I. However, the architect is not presently known.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

57.49000, 60.22330per Wikidata