Glebovsky Bridge and the Cathedral Bell Tower

The stone base of the bell tower consists of three tiers; above it, the fourth tier and the spire rest on an iron frame. The arch at its base remains the entrance to Ryazan Kremlin from Glebovsky Bridge. This route is older than the tower itself: the main gates stood here, and the wooden bridge across the moat was later replaced by a stone crossing without changing the line of the entrance.

Gavrila Ryumin did not live to see this bell tower completed. In eighteen sixteen, the second tier was built with his money, and the bells were moved there. Then the funds ran out, and the tower remained unfinished for several decades.

Ryumin was a Ryazan merchant and a wine-tax farmer. The treasury granted such entrepreneurs the right to collect revenue from the wine trade: the tax farmer was obliged to pay a pre-agreed sum, and everything collected above it became his profit. Ryumin made a large fortune from tax farming and invested part of that money in the Cathedral Bell Tower. He died in eighteen twenty-seven, when only two tiers stood above the old fortress entrance.

It proved difficult to continue construction even after the state allocated money. The winner of the competition, the capital's architect Konstantin Thon, proposed adding a third tier and stopping there: the ground at the edge of the hill was considered unreliable. The provincial architect Nikolai Voronikhin wanted to raise the bell tower higher. He had studied under Thon, but here he disagreed with his teacher and persuaded the archbishop to request permission for a fourth tier with a spire.

Voronikhin did not load the old foundation with new masonry. He placed a metal frame on the vault of the third tier; the walls and columns of the fourth tier, as well as the nearly twenty-five-meter spire, were made of sheet iron. Nikolai Ryumin, the eldest son of the deceased merchant, gave ten thousand rubles and a chiming clock for this work. The bell tower was completed in eighteen forty. After its consecration, a brief memorial service for Gavrila Ryumin was held here: the father paid for the second tier, and the son for the tower's completion.

The bell tower stands here because Glebov Tower, with the main gates of Ryazan Kremlin, once stood in its place. A wooden bridge led across the moat to those gates. When the fortifications were dismantled, the builders replaced it with a stone bridge and kept the passage on the same line—it now runs beneath the bell tower.

The bridge took its name from Glebov Gate. The gate faced the ancient fortified town of Borisov-Glebov, which grew up near Boris and Gleb Cathedral. Boris and Gleb were the sons of Prince Vladimir, killed during the dynastic strife of one thousand fifteen and the first Russian saints to be canonized. Glebov Tower has long been gone, and the wooden bridge has disappeared as well. Gleb's name remained on the stone crossing, while the site of the gate was taken by the Cathedral Bell Tower, whose three lower tiers are built of stone and whose upper tier and spire rest on Voronikhin's iron frame.