St. George church and Bell tower

The church at the same time serving as a bell tower was built in the XVI century, apparently, at the same time as the Church of the Ascension. Probably, the architect of the Bell tower was also Petrok Maly, nicknamed Fryazin (Old Russian for ‘Italian’). It was mentioned that in 1640 a 53-pood, i.e. about 870 kilograms*, gospel bell was hung on the “stone bell tower of the Church of the Ascension”. It was cast on the Tsar's order by the master Daniil Matveev.

It is curious that in the early days the Bell tower’s ringing was arranged according to the Western model: to extract the sound, the bell ringer swung the bell itself, hitting it against a stationary tongue, not vice versa, as in Russian bell towers.

At the end of the XVII century, a wooden refectory was added to the church. The church was consecrated, its ground floor became an altar. In the 1840s, the wooden refectory was dismantled, and a new brick one designed by Eugraph Tyurin was built in its place. Before their restoration in the 1920s, these buildings were an integral whole: now the church of St. George and the refectory are separated, and in the gap between them you can see the Water tower gate.

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*a pood is an Old Russian weight measure equivalent to 16.38 kilograms

The church refectory houses temporary exhibitions.

Did you know that…

• The bell tower is built on the model of medieval Italian campaniles (bell towers), which often stand separately from the main building of the church. The most famous campanile is the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
• 
  The height of the Bell tower is 29 meters, while the height of the Church of the Ascension is 62 meters. Usually, bell towers were higher than churches. This makes us wonder why it turned out differently in the Church of the Ascension ensemble. We can only speculate on the reasons for this, but most likely they were conceptual: the architect decided to make the idea of the Ascension dominant, which found its expression in the high soaring building of the church.