Moscow Kremlin Wall

Put your palm flat against the brick. It is rough, slightly warm if the sun has been on it, and darker red than it looks from across the square. Look up and the wall keeps going, row after row, until it ends in a line of notched battlements against the sky. You are standing beside one of the oldest working fortifications in Europe. It still guards the seat of Russian power today.

The Kremlin sits on a hill above the meeting point of two rivers. The Moskva runs along its southern side. The smaller Neglinnaya once ran along its western side. That position made the hill worth defending from the start. The word kremlin itself simply means a fortress inside a Russian town. Many old Russian cities have one. This is the one most people mean when they say the word.

The wall in front of you is not the first. In the fourteenth century, under Prince Ivan Kalita, the hill was ringed with thick oak timber. Timber burns, and Moscow burned often. A few decades later, Prince Dmitry Donskoy replaced the wood with white limestone. For a long time, people called the city White-Stone Moscow. Almost nothing of that pale fortress survives above ground. The red brick came later, and it came from an unexpected place.

In the late fifteenth century, Grand Prince Ivan the Third wanted a fortress that matched his growing ambitions. He brought in builders from Italy. Architects such as Pietro Antonio Solari worked here, and they rebuilt the wall section by section through the 1480s and 1490s. That is the first surprise for many visitors. This symbol of Russia was designed partly by Italians, and it carries the look of fortresses in Milan and northern Italy.

You can see that Italian connection in the battlements. Each merlon, the solid tooth of brick along the top, is split into a V shape, like the tail of a swallow. In Italy this style was linked with the Ghibellines, a political faction of the Middle Ages that supported the Holy Roman Emperor. Here the shape carries no politics. It gave defenders cover while they fired through the gaps. Today it gives the wall its sharp, crown-like outline.

The wall runs for more than two kilometres in a rough triangle. Along it stand twenty towers. Each has its own name, and some are round while others are square. Their height and thickness change as the ground rises and falls. In places, the wall is thick enough for a broad walkway along the top, hidden from you behind the battlements. Soldiers once moved along that walkway from tower to tower without being seen from outside.

Now look at the tower roofs. Those tall, pointed tops, layered and decorative, were not part of the Italian design. Russian builders added them in the seventeenth century, when the fortress no longer faced serious siege. So the towers you see are two things at once. The lower parts are military, built to resist cannon. The upper parts are ornament, built to impress. The best known is the Spasskaya Tower on Red Square, with its large clock.

Here is a second surprise. The wall has not always been red. At several points in its history, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was whitewashed. Old paintings show a pale Kremlin. The bare red brick that feels so permanent is partly a choice made by later restorers. The wall has also been damaged and repaired many times. In 1812, Napoleon's army retreated from Moscow and blew up parts of the fortress. Some towers had to be rebuilt.

On the tallest towers, look for the stars. They are made of ruby-coloured glass and glow red after dark. They were installed in the 1930s, in Soviet times, and they replaced the double-headed eagles that had stood there before. The eagles were the symbol of the old empire. The stars were the symbol of the new state. The fact that they remain today shows how many layers of history sit on this single structure.

The stretch of wall facing Red Square is also a burial ground. After the revolution of 1917, Bolshevik fighters were buried in mass graves at its foot. Later, the ashes of many Soviet figures were placed in urns set into the wall itself. Among them are the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and the writer Maxim Gorky. An American journalist, John Reed, who wrote about the revolution, also lies here. Lenin's Mausoleum stands in front of this section.

Walk around to the western side and the mood changes. Here the wall borders the Alexander Garden, a long public park. The Neglinnaya River still flows here, but it runs in a tunnel underground, beneath the paths and flower beds. Close to the wall burns the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It honours those who died in the Second World War. Soldiers stand guard there, and the changing of the guard draws a quiet crowd.

If you can, see the wall from the river side too. From the bridges over the Moskva, the whole southern face opens up in one long line. Above it, the golden domes of the Kremlin cathedrals rise behind the brick. From here, the scale becomes clear. This is not one building. It is a walled city on a hill, with palaces and churches and offices inside, all held together by this single ring of red stone.

Before you move on, look once more at the brick near your feet. Some of it is old. Some of it is new, laid by restorers. It is hard to tell them apart at a glance, and that is the point. This wall has been burned, painted, damaged and rebuilt for more than five hundred years. As you walk away, watch the battlements against the sky... and notice how the line of swallowtails follows you down the street.