Moscow Guide
The Kremlin
The Tsar Bell and Cannon
The Tsar Cannon (Tsar-pushka) is one of the largest cannons ever made; its bronze barrel (bearing a relief of Ivan the Terrible's son, Fyodor) is 5.34m long, weighs 40 tonnes and has a calibre of 890mm. Cast by Andrei Chokhov in 1586, it was intended to defend the Saviour Gate, but has never been fired in battle (though it was used to fire the ashes of the False Dmitri back towards Poland). Its enormous chassis, decorated with a lion and a snake fighting on either side, and a snarling lion's head beneath the barrel, was cast in 1835, like the cannonballs piled in front (which are purely ornamental, as the cannon was originally meant to fire stone case shot).
Further along, behind the Ivan the Great Belltower, looms the earthbound Tsar Bell (Tsar-kolokol), the largest in the world, weighing 200 tonnes (almost fifteen times as much as London's Big Ben) and measuring 6.14m in height and 6.6m in diameter. Its bronze surface is emblazoned with portraits of Tsar Alexei and Empress Anna, who decreed the creation of the original and existing versions of the bell. The first, 130-tonne, version was cast in 1655, during Alexei's reign, but nineteen years elapsed before anyone could work out how to hoist it into the belfry, whence it fell to the ground and shattered in the fire of 1701. Thirty years later, Anna ordered the fragments to be used for a much larger bell, which lay in its casting pit for over a century, having cracked in 1737, when fire once again swept the Kremlin and water was poured on the red-hot bell. Finally, in 1836, the Tsar Bell was excavated and installed in its present location, accompanied by a chunk that broke off, itself weighing 11 tonnes.