Kuznetsky Fortress Museum-Reserve, Novokuznetsk: overview, description, history and interesting facts

More than twenty hectares are the reserve, the main museum of Kuzbass is the Kuznetsk fortress. The main part of the fortress is located on the Ascension mountain, which is part of the Stanovoi mane, a mountain chain towering over the city of Novokuznetsk from the side of the same name area. The museum itself began its work in 1991 to study, preserve and promote such an interesting object as Kuznetskaya Fortress - a remarkable monument of fortification history, an object of a cultural heritage of federal significance.

Territory

On the territory there is not only the fortress Kuznetskaya, but also other natural and historical monuments. There is even a beautiful waterfall in the canyon near the Verhotom Redoubt. At least ten architectural and military-fortification objects can be viewed on excursions by residents and guests of the city. The preservation of these monuments is different, the restoration work is ongoing.

There are also monuments of archeology - of all kinds. Research is still underway, and it can not do without finds. Kuznetskaya Fortress is not yet fully explored. The exposition of the museum through such research is constantly updated. It presents the military history of the region, the materials of the excavation site, the history of the fortification lines, and the prison castle, which was also in the fortress since the seventeenth century. The museum helps to propagate military-patriotic traditions, collects folklore and supports folk culture.

Work of the museum

In December 1991 the museum was opened, and its first employees settled on Narodnaya Street in a dilapidated building. Since the beginning of 1992, not only a comprehensive study of the fortress began through archival and archaeological research, but also works on restoration have been widely deployed. Ethnographic, archaeological and historical expeditions were organized to staff the museum's funds. Thus, Kuznetsk fortress gained its second birth.

In the spring of 1993, the museum moved to the house of the merchant Fonaryov at Vodopadnaya Street, where it is still located. At the same time, the issue of "Kuznetsk antiquity" - a periodical historical and regional history magazine - was established. In 1994, the museum opened a scientific library with books from the collection of an archaeologist from the neighboring city of Prokopyevsk MG Yelkin. Then the first exhibition devoted to the principles of Siberian art was held.

Restoration

Then the archive is formed, various exhibitions are created and held. In 1998, compensatory construction was carried out - large-scale reconstruction works. The Barnaul gates and two stone half-bastions, the soldiers' barracks - that's what the Kuznetsk fortress was enriched at that time. Novokuznetsk is a city of beautiful and glorious traditions, and from that moment it has become historically richer many times. It was here that the Day of the City began to be held.

But this is still far from all the good things that began to happen on the territory of the Kuznetsk fortress. Metallurgists from the foundry of ZSMK produced twelve exact copies of serfs, which previously stood here on the carriage, and two bronze mortars, which were also placed on the walls of the fortress. And in 2001 the same shop gave the museum two exact copies of the bronze coffins of Cugorn, which are now housed in a permanent exposition. A year later, the fortress was waiting for another gift - cast-iron poods and two-pound mortars on the carriage.

Memory

In 2002, the wall of the soldiers' barracks also received a gift from the foundry: it housed two memorial plates, which listed the names of residents of Kuznetsk, awarded St. George's Crosses. And the walls of the fortress itself were replenished with guns on field carriages with cast-iron and bronze trunks. In 2003, a plaster bust of sculptor EE Potekhin's work was installed on the territory, later replaced with cast iron, in honor of Lieutenant-General PN Putilov.

The bust was also made in the foundry of the West Siberian Metallurgical Combine. The exposition of the museum was constantly replenished with materials of excavations, more and more new expositions were arranged. In the soldiers' barracks the whole section is dedicated to the famous kuznechaninu - artist of the naval ministry, famous in the second half of the nineteenth century. A portrait bas-relief and a memorial plate were made by all the same metallurgists of the foundry.

The second stage of construction

For the first half year of 2008, the Kuznetsk fortress became even closer to its original appearance. Novokuznetsk conducted another large-scale work of compensatory construction. This time, the northern and southern grades were restored and the building was constructed according to the original drawings of the Ober-Officers' House. There was also laid a wooden chapel, which was adorned with its carved ornament in ancient times. The Ober-Officer House hosted major historical exhibitions on the Kuznetsk prison, the Kuznetsk fortress and the Kuznetsk defense line.

And in the soldiers' barracks the exhibition on the ancient history of the region was built with great success, where a variety of materials from the excavations were collected, presented chronologically - from the Paleolithic, which carried the viewer in the twentieth millennium BC to archaeological monuments of the seventeenth century AD. The exposition included entertaining historical reconstructions that showed the ancient inhabitants of the region, whose appearance was restored to the found skulls. Novokuznechans are very fond of their museum.

Kuznetsk fortress

The fortress was built twenty years, which for the nineteenth century is not so much, from 1800 to 1820. Here continued the system of fortifications, the main purpose of which is to contain China's aggression, which always looked with lust (and now!) To Southern Siberia and its truly fertile lands. However, in 1846 the military history of the Kuznetsk fortress was finished: it was removed from the balance by the military ministry. She was re-profiled, having organized a prison for criminals, which existed in the fortress until 1919. And in the Civil War, all the structures related to the penitentiary system of tsarism were burned.

The prison itself was built long before the main fortress - it was the beginning of the seventeenth century. Its construction helped to form the entire defensive system on the Ascension mountain (formerly it was called Mogilnaya). All the fortifications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were earthy or wooden and had a very traditional tower design for those times: the towers were located along the entire perimeter of the city, that is, they defended not only the prison.

Before the formation of the city

The Ascension semi-bastion of the Kuznetsk fortress was preserved with part of the wall and remains of several towers. On the Tombstone and in the seventeenth century this wall could pass exactly in the same way as it was reconstructed today - with a dug trench and a piled shaft. It is well known that in 1717, on the very promontory of this mountain, there was an earth citadel. In 1689, the prison was proclaimed a city that defended the area from "attacks by the Kirghiz and Kalmyks" (as the Tatar-Mongols, Chinese, Altaians and Shorians called then), according to the highest assent of the king's majesty.

For even more fortified bastions a little higher along the banks of the Tom and north of the city laid the second citadel, which was connected with the city by a wooden wall, and along the circumference from the land the fortress was built of thick logs with hammered stakes. Even then, as the model of the Kuznetsk fortress shows, the wall had eight gates and was almost two and a half versts. Four shafts of the citadel repeated the structure of the mountainous shore of Tom, at the corners of the ramparts there were bastions and two gates with wooden towers. Inside the citadel in those days was only a chapel, more than a single building. All the gates were powerfully protected by guns. Now the museum "Kuznetsk fortress" continues to work on this mockup. Novokuznetsk also preferred to recreate the living and later appearance of this monument, with interesting fortifications.

XVIII century

By the end of the eighteenth century the fortifications of the fortress were completely dilapidated, but the city of Kuznetsk itself had to continue its high mission as a stronghold of the eastern flank of the linear boundary system of a grandiose length - from the Caspian to the Altai. Therefore, the modernization of all Kuznets fortifications was prepared and approved by Emperor Paul I.

There were to appear new earthworks at the base of the Grave Mountain and on its summit. In 1800 the construction began, and by 1820 the Kuznetsk fortress was completely renovated. Novokuznetsk, whose history began and developed simultaneously with the life of this defense fort, is now restoring this particular version of the location of the bastions.

What happened

The whole fortress took the form of an elongated rectangle, along the main perimeter of which there were ramparts with eddles, to which the ramps for guns were piled from the inside. On the Cape of Mogilnaya Mountain there was an additional square redoubt, from which a long shaft with an editorial was leading to the fortress. At the corners, half-bastions, faced with sandstone, threatened the aggressors, and equipped with twenty-meter platforms for artillery.

Between the half-bastions a three-storeyed brick spy tower towered high. Defensive ditches and shafts were completely formed. Of the previously existing buildings, only the chapel remained. Constructors and civilian workers built and renovated the fortress.

Gray-haired old man

Until 1806, as established by archival documents, the museum-reserve, Kuznetsk fortress had only one stone building - a one-story guardhouse with a high four-pitched roof and a dormer window. In front of the building was a wooden parade ground with a sentry box. The guardhouse at that time was not an institution for short-term arrest, but a guardroom. This building was located near the Kuznetsk gate. Usually inside the building, soldiers from the shift guard rested.

In 1810, the guardhouse was completely renovated, for the soldiers laid out a brick oven, equipped with wooden floors. When the fortress left the defense, the building was abandoned, quickly decayed and in 1869 sold for scrap. Only in 1970, it was rebuilt. So old is a stone powder cellar with a gable roof with two annexes. Around him towered a powerful fence far above the cellar itself. The sod roof in 1810 was covered with stone slabs, the cornice was laid out for water drainage.

Soldier's barracks

This brick building on a stone base was built in 1808. Sixteen windows were located along the entire length of the facade on each side, the roof was high, a gable roof, with six dormer windows, was divided vertically by a ventilation ledge. The entire barracks consisted of two parts, symmetrically isolated, with separate entrances. The room was heated with ovens. Along the walls there were two bunk bunks. Nevertheless, the beauty of the building was not lacking: along the entire length stretched a wall with arched apertures.

There were two hundred and seventy people of the Biysk garrison and a disabled team. After the abolition of the fortress as a military structure, the soldiers' barracks were given from 1842 to keep criminals in it. Many times the building was rebuilt and repaired, and in December 1919 the prison was burned by partisans. So the historical soldier's barracks for a long time ceased to exist. On its ruins in the 90 years of the twentieth century, numerous excavations were carried out, and the materials found adorned the exposition of the museum.

Ober-officer's house

In this stone house lived four officers of the Biysk battalion, who served in the garrison of the fortress. A one-story building with two entrances and eleven windows on the main facade was built simply, but, as was customary in those days, not without frills. Roof with ventilation and gaps between the ramps, tambours with washrooms and beautiful triangular stoves in living rooms is proof of this.

In total, there were nine rooms in the building, five of them residential - on the one hand, kitchen and utility rooms on the other. In the nineteenth century the Ober-Officers' House was given up under a military infirmary. The building was gradually destroyed, and in 1905, in its place, a dwelling house was built for the overseers and their families. But this house soon burned down. Only in 2000 the Ober-Officers' House was rebuilt.