Rostov Kremlin

Seen from the far side of Lake Nero, the Rostov Kremlin looks less like a fortress than a city of domes: silvered onion cupolas, white walls, round towers capped with timber tents. It was never really built for war. Metropolitan Iona Sysoevich, who led the diocese from 1652 until 1690, raised it in the 1670s and 1680s as his residence and as a vision of the heavenly Jerusalem on earth, after the town had been sacked by Polish-Lithuanian troops in 1608. The walls, about 875 metres around with eleven towers and five gates, enclose some 4.3 hectares of courtyards, chambers, ponds and a reconstructed garden, and they are as much stage scenery as defence.

The oldest building is the Assumption Cathedral of 1508–1512, older than the ensemble that grew up around it. Beside it stands the belfry, finished in the 1680s, which holds fifteen historic bells. The largest, Sysoy, cast in 1688, weighs 2,000 poods, roughly 32 tonnes; Polyeleine and Swan, cast a few years earlier by Moscow founders, follow at 1,000 and 500 poods. The bells were tuned to work together, and the peals known as the Rostov chimes are rung as music rather than as signals, a tradition the town still guards.

What rewards slow looking are the gate churches set into the walls. The Church of the Resurrection over the holy gate and the Church of St John the Theologian, both from the Iona years, are tall, narrow and almost entirely covered inside with frescoes: the St John church was painted in 1683 with scenes from the lives of the apostle and of Abraham of Rostov, the town's own saint. The colour has survived because the interiors were barely altered, and standing in them gives a rare sense of how a late-seventeenth-century Russian church was meant to feel. Smaller treasures follow: the Hodigitria church of the 1690s with its painted facade, the Church of the Saviour-on-the-Porch, the long ceremonial halls of the metropolitan's court.

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. Rostov itself, first recorded in 862 and one of the oldest towns in Russia, is today a quiet place of some thirty thousand people on the Golden Ring, still known for its painted enamel, finift.

Getting there

The kremlin is in the centre of Rostov Veliky, about 0.7 km from the town's core, on the shore of Lake Nero, 202 km north-east of Moscow. The nearest airport is Yaroslavl Tunoshna (IAR), about 61 km away, though most visitors come from Moscow. Rostov-Yaroslavsky railway station lies on the line between Moscow and Yaroslavl, and the kremlin is a short walk or taxi ride from it.