Who built the Kremlin in Moscow: the Italian architects of Ivan III, the red walls of 1485–95, the cathedrals, the towers and the stars, and what "Kremlin" means

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Moscow Kremlin as it stands was built between 1475 and 1516 for Grand Prince Ivan III by Italian architects: Aristotele Fioravanti of Bologna built the Dormition Cathedral in 1475–79, Marco Ruffo and Pietro Antonio Solari of Milan the red brick walls and the first towers in 1485–95 and the Palace of Facets, Antonio Gilardi and Aloisio da Milano more towers and the Annunciation and Archangel cathedrals, and Bon Fryazin the Bell Tower of Ivan the Great in 1505–08, on the site of forts that had stood on the hill above the Moskva since 1156. The walls, 2,235 m long with 20 towers, are the largest fortress in Europe still in use as a seat of government; the tented roofs on the towers are Russian additions of the 1600s, the red stars of 1937, and the glass Palace of Congresses of 1961. The word kremlin means "citadel" and twenty Russian cities have one. Below: what stood before, Ivan III and why he sent to Italy, each building and its architect, what was added and destroyed after, the word, the numbers, visiting, and the myths, with the Kremlin's Soviet palace in the Buildings by style collection and its Byzantine ancestry in Byzantine architecture.

The forts before it

The Borovitsky hill, where the Neglinnaya joined the Moskva, was fortified with an earth rampart and oak palisade by Yuri Dolgoruky in 1156, nine years after the first mention of Moscow; the Mongols burned it in 1237, Ivan Kalita rebuilt it in oak in 1339, and Dmitry Donskoy, before his victory over the Mongols at Kulikovo in 1380, replaced the oak with walls of white limestone from the Myachkovo quarries in 1367, the "white-stone Kremlin" from which Moscow took its name of the white-stone city, and which withstood two Lithuanian sieges and fell to Tokhtamysh in 1382 by trickery. By the 1470s the limestone was crumbling, and Ivan III, who had stopped paying tribute to the Horde in 1480 and had married Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, in 1472, wanted a capital fit for the "Third Rome"; his own masons' new Dormition Cathedral collapsed in 1474 while being built, and on Sophia's advice, it is said, he sent to Italy for architects. Moscow Kremlin.

Fioravanti and the Dormition Cathedral, 1475–79

Aristotele Fioravanti of Bologna, an engineer famous for moving a bell tower whole and straightening a leaning one, was sixty when Ivan's envoy brought him to Moscow in 1475 for a salary of ten roubles a month; he was sent to Vladimir to study the 12th-century Dormition Cathedral there, the model the Russians wanted, and built its Moscow successor in four years as a Russian church with Italian engineering: five domes and the Vladimir proportions outside, but a plan of equal bays on slender round piers, iron tie-rods in the vaults, brick in the vaults and fired to his own recipe, and a mortar mixed with a method he taught the Russians, so that the interior is one bright hall rather than a forest of piers. It was the coronation church of the tsars from Ivan IV in 1547 to Nicholas II in 1896 and the burial place of the metropolitans and patriarchs, and its frescoes of 1642–43 and its icons, including the 12th-century Virgin of Vladimir's place, are the heart of Russian Orthodoxy. Fioravanti also cast cannon, minted coins and went on Ivan's campaigns; he asked to go home, was refused, was imprisoned after a doctor at court was executed, and died in Moscow about 1486.

The walls and towers, 1485–95

• The builders. Marco Ruffo (Mark Fryazin, "the Frank", as the Russians called all Italians), Pietro Antonio Solari, son of the architect of Milan Cathedral, Antonio Gilardi (Anton Fryazin) and Aloisio da Carcano (Aleviz Fryazin the Elder), between 1485 and 1495, tower by tower, starting with the Taynitskaya on the river in 1485 and finishing the north side by 1495; the walls are of red brick on a white limestone base, the Milanese castle of the Sforzas, with the swallow-tail merlons of Ghibelline Italy, in Moscow.
• The plan. A triangle of 27.5 hectares between the Moskva, the Neglinnaya and Red Square, with a moat of 1508 by Aleviz on the square side, filled in 1814; walls 5 to 19 m high and 3.5 to 6.5 m thick, 2,235 m long, with a walk behind the merlons and 1,045 merlons.
• The towers. Twenty, of which the Spasskaya (1491, Solari), with the clock and the gate the tsars entered by, the Nikolskaya, the Troitskaya, the tallest at 80 m, the Borovitskaya and the Taynitskaya with its secret well are the gate towers, the round Vodovzvodnaya, Beklemishevskaya and Arsenalnaya the corners, and the Kutafya the only surviving barbican, in front of the Trinity Bridge; the tented roofs of green tile on all of them were added between 1625 and 1680 by Russian builders, the Spasskaya's by the Englishman Christopher Galloway with the clock, and the towers as seen are half Italian and half Muscovite.
• Solari's inscription. On the Spasskaya gate, in Latin and Russian, of 1491, naming Ivan III and "Petrus Antonius Solarius Mediolanensis" as the builder, the earliest architect's signature in Russia.

The palaces and the cathedrals

• Palace of Facets (Ruffo and Solari, 1487–91). The oldest secular building in Moscow, a throne hall 500 square metres under vaults on a single central pier, faced outside with diamond-pointed rustication in the manner of Ferrara and Bologna, where Ivan IV feasted after taking Kazan and where the state dinners are still held.
• Annunciation Cathedral (Pskov masters, 1484–89). The tsars' private church, by Russians, with icons by Theophanes the Greek and Andrei Rublev of 1405 from the earlier church and a floor of jasper; the nine domes of its present form are of the 1560s.
• Deposition of the Robe (Pskov masters, 1484–86). The metropolitans' chapel, small and white.
• Archangel Cathedral (Aleviz the New, 1505–08). The burial church of the princes and tsars from Ivan Kalita to Ivan V, by a Venetian who gave a Russian five-domed church a Renaissance facade of pilasters, cornices and shell-shaped gables; 54 tombs, Ivan the Terrible's in the sanctuary.
• Bell Tower of Ivan the Great (Bon Fryazin, 1505–08; raised 1600). An octagonal tower of three tiers raised by Boris Godunov to 81 m as the tallest building in Russia, which no building in Moscow might exceed until 1860, with 21 bells; Napoleon's men blew up its belfries and the tower stood.
• Terem Palace (1635–36). The tsars' Russian-style residence of painted chambers, hidden inside the Great Kremlin Palace.
• The Arsenal (1702–36), the Senate (Kazakov, 1776–87), the neoclassical triangle that houses the President, and the Great Kremlin Palace (Thon, 1839–49), Nicholas I's 700-room Russo-Byzantine residence on the river front, with the St George Hall.

1812 and the Soviet century

Napoleon lived in the Kremlin for five weeks in 1812 while Moscow burned around it and, leaving on 19 October, ordered it mined; rain wet the fuses and Russians cut some, but the Vodovzvodnaya, the Petrovskaya and the first Bezymyannaya towers, parts of the wall, the Arsenal and the belfries of the Ivan tower were blown up, and were rebuilt by Osip Bove and others by 1822. The Bolsheviks shelled the Kremlin in the fighting of November 1917, damaging the Spasskaya clock, the Beklemishevskaya tower and the cathedrals, and moved the government in from Petrograd in March 1918, closing the Kremlin to the public for nearly forty years; the double-headed eagles on the towers were replaced with gilded copper stars in 1935 and with the ruby glass stars, lit from within, in 1937. Stalin demolished the Chudov and Ascension monasteries in 1929–30 for a military school, and the Church of the Saviour in the Wood in 1933, the Kremlin's oldest, and the Red Porch of the Palace of Facets in 1930, rebuilt in 1994; the Palace of Congresses of 1961, by Mikhail Posokhin, a glass and marble hall of 6,000 seats sunk 15 m into the ground so as not to overtop the walls, replaced a wing of the Armoury and the old buildings behind the Troitskaya tower, and is now the State Kremlin Palace for the Bolshoi's second stage and concerts. The Kremlin reopened to visitors in 1955, and UNESCO listed it with Red Square in 1990; the 14th Corpus, a 1932 barracks building, was demolished in 2016 and the foundations of the monasteries it stood on displayed.

The word, the numbers and visiting

• The word. Kreml, first recorded in 1331 as kremnik, is the citadel of a Russian town, from a root meaning "strong" or perhaps from the Greek kremnos, a steep bank; Novgorod, Pskov, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Tula, Smolensk, Rostov and a dozen more have kremlins, and Kazan's and Novgorod's are also World Heritage Sites. "The Kremlin" as the Russian government dates from the 1920s.
• Size. 27.5 hectares; the walls 2,235 m, 5–19 m high, 3.5–6.5 m thick; 20 towers, the Troitskaya 80 m, the Spasskaya 71 m; the Bell Tower 81 m.
• Dates. Wooden fort 1156; white stone 1367; Italian rebuilding 1475–1516; tented roofs 1625–80; Great Palace 1849; stars 1937; Palace of Congresses 1961.
• The Tsar Cannon (1586), 40 tons and 890 mm calibre, never fired, and the Tsar Bell (1735), 202 tons, the largest in the world, cracked in the fire of 1737 before it was raised and standing beside the Bell Tower with its 11.5-ton fragment.
• Visiting. Entry through the Kutafya tower with tickets for the Cathedral Square, the Armoury (by timed session, with the Fabergé eggs, the thrones and the coronation robes) and the Diamond Fund; closed on Thursdays and on state occasions; the Senate and the palaces are not open, the Great Kremlin Palace by invitation. The Spasskaya gate opens to Red Square since 2014. The changing of the guard in Cathedral Square is on Saturdays in summer.

Versions and theories

• The Kremlin was always red. The brick walls were whitewashed from the 18th century to the 1880s, as the old white-stone walls had been, and appear white in paintings and early photographs; the red is the brick, exposed in the 19th century and painted red under the Soviets.
• Fioravanti built the walls. He built the cathedral and advised; the walls and towers are Ruffo, Solari, Gilardi and Aleviz, and Fioravanti was dead by the time most of them rose.
• Sophia brought the Italians. The chronicles say the envoy Semyon Tolbuzin was sent to Venice in 1474; Sophia, raised in Rome, is credited with the idea, and the marriage is why Moscow took the double-headed eagle.
• The Kremlin has secret tunnels and Ivan the Terrible's library. The Taynitskaya tower had a well and a passage to the river, and passages under the walls have been found; the "Liberia", the Greek library that Sophia is said to have brought and Ivan IV to have hidden, has been sought since the 17th century and never found. It probably burned.
• Napoleon destroyed the Kremlin. He tried; three towers, a stretch of wall, the Arsenal and the belfries went, and were rebuilt by 1822.
• The stars are rubies. Ruby-coloured glass, two layers with milk glass between, 3 to 3.75 m across, weighing a ton each, lit by 5,000-watt lamps and turning with the wind; they have been lit since 1937 except in the war and for one film in 1996.

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