Tower of Bratsk Stockaded Fort

The Bratsk Stockaded Fort was founded in the 1630s, on the Angara River, not far from the present-day Bratsk city. Its founders, the Cossacks, made the fortress a Russian stronghold in the Baikal region. The fort played a great part in exploration of Siberia and the Far East.

The fort was square in plan, and each of its walls was 64 meters long. The four rectangular towers were connected with a stockade. Each tower had two levels: the lower one was dwelling while the upper one served for battle.

In the 1950s, the surviving fort buildings fell within the flooding area of the Bratsk Reservoir being built.  It was decided to transport them to a new site. Thus, the south-western tower now makes part of the Angara Village Museum-Reserve, in Irkutsk region, while the north-eastern one has found a new home at Kolomenskoe.

Did you know that…

• in the winter of 1656-1657, the north-western tower of the Bratsk stockaded fort could have been the imprisonment place of Protopope Avvakum, famous opponent of church reforms directed against Old Believers;
• in 1790, on his way to exile, writer Alexander Radischev stayed at the Bratsk fort;
• the word ‘Bratsk’ comes from the simplified ethnonym ‘braty’ – that is how the Russian settlers called the local Mongolian people, the Buriats, mixing it up with ‘brothers’.