Spasskaya Tower of Ilimsk Ostrog

On July twenty-fourth, sixteen sixty-six, a fire destroyed Ilimsk Ostrog completely. Three months later, the new voivode, Sila Osipovich Onichkov, arrived here—a governor of Ilim Uyezd appointed by the tsar. He was to collect taxes, judge disputes, and command the servicemen, but instead of a fortress he found an empty fire-scorched site.

Onichkov rejected the old site: the narrow valley between steep mountains left no room to expand the fortification. He chose a new location about one and a half kilometers downstream on the Ilim River. He then assigned the preparation of logs among the arable peasants of the entire uyezd—farmers whose obligations depended on the size of their cultivated land. In winter, they felled the forest and hauled it to the future wall. Construction was overseen by the clerk Nikita Lazarev, an official of the local administrative office; servicemen and clergy worked alongside him.

On July twenty-first, sixteen sixty-seven, Onichkov marked out the boundaries of the new ostrog and was the first to lay the foundation of the large Spasskaya Tower. Two years later, the voivode was already living inside the completed fortification. The peasants' logs had become a wall with eight towers, and the main entrance from the road from Yeniseysk passed right here, between double-leaf gates with a wicket gate.

The name is also connected with the gates. The Saviour is Jesus Christ; in the outer chapel above the passage stood an icon of the Saviour Not Made by Hands. On the inner side hung a second chapel with an image of the Mother of God. Both projected from the log structure like roofed balconies. Above them were a watch platform and an oblam—a projecting section with openings through which defenders could shoot down at a person who had come right up to the wall.

By the middle of the twentieth century, only one of the eight towers remained. Its roof, floors, and stairs had collapsed; livestock were kept inside it during the day. When old Ilimsk fell within the area of the future Ust-Ilimsk Reservoir, the conservation architect Galina Oranskaya was tasked with choosing a site for a museum where the doomed wooden monuments could be moved. She chose Taltsy by the Angara River.

In nineteen sixty-nine, restorers dismantled the Spasskaya Tower and removed it from Ilimsk. For several years, the logs lay here in a special shed. In nineteen eighty-two, Oranskaya began reassembling the tower; the work was completed two years later.

The five lower log courses of the present structure have been replaced; everything above them is built from the old logs. Visitors now enter the museum Ilimsk Ostrog through the restored gates, while the place where Onichkov marked out its boundary lies on the bottom of the Ust-Ilimsk Reservoir.