Tsar Bell

Listen for a moment. Around you there are footsteps on paving stones, voices in a dozen languages, and perhaps a church bell somewhere above. But the enormous bronze shape in front of you makes no sound at all. It never has. Its surface is dark and green-brown, cool to look at even on a summer day. And at its base, resting against the pedestal, lies a broken slab of metal taller than a grown man.

This is the Tsar Bell, inside the walls of the Moscow Kremlin. It stands at the foot of the Ivan the Great Bell Tower, the tall white tower that rises just beside you. The setting matters. Those belfries were built to carry sound across the city. The bell in front of you was meant to be the loudest voice of all. Instead, it became one of the quietest objects in Moscow, a monument to ambition, fire and bad luck.

First, consider the size. The bell weighs roughly two hundred tonnes. It stands more than six metres high, and its rim is wider than it is tall. Walk slowly around it and count your steps. Most people need far more than they expect. For centuries, people have called it the largest bell in the world. Whether or not you care about records, standing next to it makes the scale very clear.

The story begins in the early eighteenth century, but with an older bell. Moscow already had a long tradition of giant bells. An earlier great bell had hung in the Kremlin and had been damaged in a fire. In the 1730s, Empress Anna Ioannovna ordered a new one. She wanted it bigger than anything before it. Much of the metal from the older broken bell went into the new casting. So the bronze you see carries pieces of an earlier Moscow inside it.

The work went to a family of founders, Ivan Motorin and his son Mikhail. Casting a bell this size was not done in a workshop. It was done in a deep pit dug right here in the Kremlin grounds. A mould was built inside the pit, and molten bronze was poured into it. The first attempt ran into trouble. Ivan Motorin died before the work was finished, and his son completed the casting in 1735. The bell then stayed in its pit while craftsmen finished its decoration.

Then came the disaster. In 1737, a great fire swept through the Kremlin. The wooden structure over the casting pit caught fire. According to the usual account, people threw cold water onto the scaffolding to fight the flames. The hot bronze met the cold water, and the bell cracked. A large piece broke away from its side. That is the slab you see beside the pedestal. It alone weighs around eleven tonnes, heavier than many church bells in Europe.

Here is something many visitors miss. The Tsar Bell was never hung, and it was never rung. Not once. It cracked while it was still sitting in the ground where it was made. For about a century afterwards, it simply stayed in that pit. Visitors to Moscow would climb down to look at it. Some foreign travellers wrote about it as a curiosity, a giant buried in the earth of the Kremlin.

That changed in 1836. The French-born architect Auguste de Montferrand, who also worked on large projects in Saint Petersburg, organised the effort to raise the bell. Engineers lifted it out of the pit and set it on the stone pedestal you see today. The broken piece was placed beside it. From that moment, the bell became something new. It was no longer a failed instrument. It was a monument, meant to be looked at rather than heard.

Now look closely at the surface. The bell is covered with relief decoration. You can find full-length figures of two rulers. One is Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, the father of Peter the Great. The other is Empress Anna Ioannovna, who ordered the bell. Between and above them are religious images, including Christ, the Virgin Mary and Orthodox saints. Bands of ornament run around the top, with leaves, scrolls and angels. There are also inscribed panels in old Church Slavonic, the traditional language of Russian church texts.

If you move around to the side of the crack, you can see the damage up close. The edges of the break are rough and uneven. Look at how thick the bronze is there. It is much thicker than you might imagine from a distance. This is the real surprise of standing here. A bell this heavy was a gamble from the start. Even without the fire, nobody can say for certain that a tower could have held it, or that it could have been rung safely.

Notice also what stands nearby. Just a short walk away is the Tsar Cannon, another giant bronze object from Russia's past. Like the bell, it is famous more for its size than for its use. Together the two pieces tell a similar story. They show a court that wanted to impress with scale. They also show the limits of what metal, fire and human skill could do. Many visitors photograph both, and it is worth seeing them one after the other.

Think, too, about the people who built it. The names we remember are the Motorins, father and son. But dozens of workers dug the pit, built the mould, fed the furnaces and handled the molten metal. Their names are mostly lost. Their work is still here. Every curve of that bronze surface was shaped by hand. When you look at the decoration, you are looking at the skill of craftsmen who never heard their bell ring.

Before you move on, stand still for a minute. Look up at the white bell tower, then back down at the silent bronze. Above you, working bells still hang in their arches. In front of you is the one that never made a sound. Run your eyes along the crack once more. Then, as you walk away across the square, listen to the city around you, and remember the voice that Moscow never heard.