Ostankino Tower

Stand at the base and tilt your head back. The concrete rises above you, pale grey and almost endless. It narrows as it climbs, until the antenna at the top becomes a thin line against the sky. On a windy day, you may hear a low hum around the supports. That is the sound of air moving around one of the tallest structures in Europe. Before any history, notice the scale. The tower is so tall that clouds sometimes hide its upper section from the people walking below.

This is Ostankino Tower, in the north of Moscow. It rises about 540 metres from the ground to the tip of its antenna. When it was completed in 1967, it was the tallest freestanding structure on Earth. It held that title until 1976, when the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, overtook it. Today, taller towers and skyscrapers exist in Asia and the Middle East. But in Europe, nothing built by people stands higher than this concrete needle.

The tower was built to send television and radio signals across Moscow and the surrounding region. In the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet television was growing fast. The older transmitter tower in the city could not reach far enough. Engineers needed height, because higher antennas send signals over a wider area. The tower opened in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967. For the Soviet state, it was both a practical machine and a public symbol of technical progress.

The man behind the design was Nikolai Nikitin, a Soviet structural engineer. He also worked on the famous Motherland Calls statue in Volgograd. According to a popular story, Nikitin sketched the basic idea for the tower in a single night. The story says he imagined a lily turned upside down, with strong petals and a long, thin stem. Whether or not the tale is exactly true, the shape matches it. Look at the base, and you can see the flower in the concrete.

Now look closely at those supports. The tower rests on ten concrete legs, which curve outward like the petals of that inverted flower. Between them are tall arched openings. Here is a detail that surprises many visitors. The foundation is remarkably shallow for a structure of this height. The tower does not depend on deep roots in the ground. Instead, its enormous weight, and the wide spread of its base, hold it steady. It works a little like a heavy doll that always returns to standing.

The second secret is inside the concrete itself. Steel cables run up through the body of the tower. These cables are pulled very tight, and they squeeze the concrete together. Engineers call this prestressed concrete. Concrete is strong when it is pressed, but weak when it is pulled or bent. The tight cables keep the concrete under pressure, so strong winds cannot crack it. At the top, the tower does move slightly in the wind. This movement is part of the design, not a fault.

But the tower also carries a darker chapter. In August 2000, a serious fire broke out high inside the structure. It spread through the cables and equipment in the upper shaft. Three people died while fighting the fire, and television broadcasts across Moscow were interrupted. Many of the steel cables that hold the concrete together were damaged. For a while, people feared the tower might be unsafe. It did not fall. Engineers repaired the cables and the systems over the following years, and the tower stayed in service.

The fire also closed the tower to visitors for a long time. Before 2000, the restaurant high in the tower was a famous place for a special dinner. It was called Seventh Heaven, and its floor slowly rotated. Diners could watch the whole city pass by during a single meal. After a long restoration, the restaurant and the observation areas reopened to the public in the 2010s. For many Muscovites who remembered the old restaurant, its return felt like a small piece of their childhood coming back.

If you go up, the journey itself is part of the experience. Fast elevators carry visitors up the shaft in well under a minute. Your ears may pop on the way. At the top, the observation deck looks out over Moscow in every direction. On clear days, the view runs far beyond the city edge. Some sections of the floor are made of glass. Standing on them, you look straight down hundreds of metres to the ground. Many people step on the glass slowly, and some do not step on it at all.

From above, the city shows its layout clearly. Moscow grew in rings around the Kremlin, and you can follow the lines of the large roads that circle the centre. To the south, look for the tall glass towers of the Moscow City business district. Closer to the tower, you will see large areas of green. Moscow has more parks and forests within its borders than many visitors expect. From this height, the trees form wide dark patches between the apartment blocks.

Back on the ground, the neighbourhood around the tower is worth a slow walk. The name Ostankino comes from an old estate in this area. Nearby stands the Ostankino Palace, a wooden palace from the late eighteenth century, built for the noble Sheremetev family. It contains a theatre where serf actors once performed for their owners. Next to the tower is the Ostankino television centre, a large building where many Russian television programmes are still made. So the area connects old aristocratic culture and modern broadcasting in one short walk.

A little to the east lies VDNKh, a huge exhibition park from the Soviet era. Its name is an abbreviation for the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy. The park is full of grand pavilions, fountains, and wide avenues. The tower is visible from almost every part of it. Between the tower and the palace there is also a pond, and a park where local families walk, cycle, and sit on benches. On calm evenings, the tower is reflected in the still water.

Before you leave, stand back again from the base. Walk a short distance away, perhaps toward the pond or the park paths. From further back, the full shape becomes clear: the curved legs, the long tapering shaft, the rings of the upper levels, and the thin antenna. At night, the tower is often lit with coloured lights. As you walk away, look back once more. The flower is still upside down, still holding its stem up into the Moscow sky.