More than twenty hectares of the reserve, the main museum of Kuzbass - the Kuznetsk fortress. The main part of the fortress is located on the Voznesenskaya Mountain, which is part of the Stanovoy Griva, a mountain range that rises above the city of Novokuznetsk from the district of the same name. The museum itself began its work in 1991 in order to study, preserve and promote such an interesting object as the Kuznetskaya fortress - a wonderful monument to the history of fortification, a cultural heritage site of federal significance.
Territory
On the territory there is not only the Kuznetskaya fortress itself, but also other natural and historical monuments. There is even a beautiful waterfall in the canyon near the Verkhotomsky redoubt. At least a dozen architectural and military fortification objects cansee residents and guests of the city on excursions. The preservation of these monuments is different, restoration work is ongoing.
Archaeological monuments of various types are also located here. Research is still ongoing, and not without finds. The Kuznetskaya Fortress has not yet been explored in its entirety. The exposition of the museum through such research is constantly updated. It presents the military history of the region, and materials from the excavations of the prison, and the history of the fortification lines, and the prison castle, which has also been located on the territory of the fortress since the seventeenth century. The museum helps promote military-patriotic traditions, collects folklore and supports folk culture.
Museum work
In December 1991, the museum opened, and its first employees settled on Narodnaya Street in a dilapidated building. Since the new year 1992, not only a comprehensive study of the fortress began through archival and archaeological research, but restoration work has also been widely deployed. Ethnographic, archaeological and historical expeditions were organized to complete the museum's funds. This is how the Kuznetsk fortress acquired its second birth.
In the spring of 1993, the museum moved to the house of the merchant Fonarev on Vodopadnaya Street, where it remains to this day. At the same time, the issue of Kuznetskaya Starina, a periodical local history journal, was launched. In 1994, a scientific library was opened at the museum with books from the collection of an archaeologist from the neighboring city of Prokopyevsk, M. G. Elkin. At the same time, the first exhibition dedicated to the principles of Siberian art was held.
Restoration
Further on, an archive is formed, various exhibitions are created and held. In 1998, compensatory construction was carried out - large-scale reconstruction work. The Barnaul gates and two stone semi-bastions, a soldier's barracks - this is what enriched the Kuznetsk fortress then. Novokuznetsk is a city of wonderful and glorious traditions, and since that moment it has become historically richer many times over. It was here that the celebration of the City Day began.
But this is far from all of the good things that began to happen on the territory of the Kuznetsk fortress. Metallurgists from the ZSMK foundry made twelve most accurate copies of the fortress guns that previously stood here on gun carriages, and two bronze mortars, which were also placed on the walls of the fortress. And in 2001, the same workshop donated to the museum two exact copies of Kuhorn's bronze mortars, which are now on permanent display. A year later, the fortress was expecting another gift - cast-iron pood and two-pood mortars on carriages.
Memory
In 2002, the wall of the soldier's barracks also received a gift from the foundry: it housed two memorial plates that listed the names of Kuznetsk residents who were awarded the St. George's Crosses. And the walls of the fortress itself were again replenished with guns on field carriages with cast-iron and bronze barrels. In 2003, a plaster bust by the sculptor E. E. Potekhin was installed on the territory, later replaced by a cast-iron one, in honor of Lieutenant General P. N. Putilov.
The bust was also made in the foundryshop of the West Siberian Metallurgical Plant. The exposition of the museum was constantly replenished with excavation materials, more and more new expositions were arranged. In the soldier's barracks, a whole section is dedicated to the famous blacksmith - the artist of the naval ministry, who became famous in the second half of the nineteenth century. The portrait bas-relief and memorial plate were made by the same metallurgists of the foundry.
Second construction phase
During the first six months of 2008, the Kuznetsk fortress became even closer to its original appearance. Novokuznetsk carried out the next large-scale compensatory construction work. This time, the northern and southern grades have been restored and the building was built according to the original drawings of the chief officer's house. A wooden chapel was also laid, which flaunted here with its carved ornaments in ancient times. The chief officer's house hosted the main historical expositions of the Kuznetsk prison, the Kuznetsk fortress and the Kuznetsk defense line.
And in the soldiers' barracks, an exposition on the ancient history of the region was built with great success, where various materials from the excavations were collected, presented chronologically - from the Paleolithic, which took the viewer to the twentieth millennium BC to archaeological sites of the seventeenth century AD. The exposition included entertaining historical reconstructions that showed the ancient inhabitants of the region, whose appearance was restored from the found skulls. Novokuznetsk residents love their museum very much.
Kuznetsk fortress
The fortress was built for twenty years, which is not so much for the nineteenth century, from 1800 to 1820. The system of fortifications continued here, the main purpose of which is to deter the aggression of China, which has always looked with lust (and even now!) At Southern Siberia and its truly fertile lands. However, in 1846 the military history of the Kuznetsk fortress was over: it was taken off the balance sheet by the War Ministry. It was redesigned by organizing a prison for criminals, which existed in the fortress until 1919. And during the Civil War, all buildings related to the penitentiary system of tsarism were burned.
The prison itself was built long before the main fortress - it was the beginning of the seventeenth century. Its construction helped form the entire defensive system on Voznesenskaya Mountain (formerly called Mogilnaya). All fortifications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were made of earth or wood and had a very traditional tower design for those times: the towers were located around the entire perimeter of the city, that is, they protected not only the prison.
Before the formation of the city
Voznesensky semi-bastion of the Kuznetsk fortress has survived with part of the wall and the remains of several towers. Even in the seventeenth century, this wall could pass on Mogilnaya Gora in exactly the same way as it has been reconstructed today - with a dug ditch and a raised rampart. It is known for sure that in 1717, on the very cape of this mountain, an earthencitadel. In 1689, the prison was proclaimed a city that defended this area from "attacks of the Kirghiz and Kalmyks" (as the Tatar-Mongols, Chinese, Altaians and Shors were then called), by the highest permission of the royal majesty.
For even greater strengthening of the bastions, a little higher along the bank of the Tom and to the north of the city, a second citadel was laid, which was connected with the city by a wooden wall, and along the circumference from the land side, the fortress was built of thick logs with driven stakes. Already then, as the model of the Kuznetsk fortress shows, the wall had eight gates and was almost two and a half miles. The four ramparts of the citadel repeated the structure of the mountainous bank of the Tom, at the corners of the ramparts there were bastions and two gates with wooden towers. Inside the citadel in those days there was only a chapel, no other building. All gates were heavily defended by cannons. Now the museum "Kuznetsk fortress" continues to work on this model. Novokuznetsk preferred to recreate the lively and later appearance of this monument, with interesting fortifications.
Eighteenth century
By the end of the eighteenth century, the earthen fortifications of the fortress were completely dilapidated, but the city of Kuznetsk itself had to continue its high mission as a stronghold of the eastern flank of the linear border system of a grandiose length - from the Caspian Sea to Altai. Therefore, the modernization of all Kuznetsk fortifications was prepared and approved by Emperor Paul I.
There should have been new onesearthen fortifications at the foot of the Mogilnaya mountain and on its top. In 1800, construction began, and by 1820 the Kuznetsk fortress had been completely renovated. Novokuznetsk, whose history began and developed simultaneously with the life of this defensive fortification, is now restoring this particular variant of the location of the bastions.
What happened
The whole fortress took the form of an elongated rectangle, along the main perimeter of which there were shafts with redans, to which ramps for guns were poured from the inside. On the cape of Mogilnaya Gora there was an additional square redoubt, from which a long shaft with a redan led to the fortress. At the corners, semi-bastions lined with sandstone inside and equipped with twenty-meter platforms for artillery threatened the aggressors.
In the gaps between the semi-bastions, a three-story brick lookout tower rose high. Defensive ditches and ramparts were fully formed. Of the pre-existing buildings, only the chapel has been preserved. The fortress was built and renovated by prisoners and civilian workers.
Grey old man
Until 1806, as the museum-reserve established according to archival documents, the Kuznetsk fortress had only one stone building - a one-story guardhouse with a high hipped roof and a dormer window. In front of the building was a wooden parade ground with a sentry box. The guardhouse at that time was not an institution for short-term arrest, but a guardhouse. This building was located near the Kuznetsk Gates. Soldiers from the changing guard usually rested inside the building.
In 1810 the guardhouse was completelyrepaired, a brick oven was laid out for the soldiers, wooden floors were equipped. When the fortress left the state of defense, the building was abandoned, quickly dilapidated and in 1869 sold for scrap. Only in 1970 it was rebuilt. Equally old is the stone gunpowder magazine with a gable roof with two outbuildings. Around it rose a powerful fence much higher than the cellar itself. The turf roof was covered with stone slabs in 1810, and a cornice was laid out to drain water.
Soldier's barracks
This brick building on a stone plinth was built in 1808. Sixteen windows were located along the entire length of the facade on each side, the roof was high, gable, with six dormers, and was divided vertically by a ventilation ledge. The whole barracks consisted of two parts, symmetrically isolated, with separate entrances. The room was heated with stoves. Along the walls were two-tiered bunks. Nevertheless, the building was not devoid of beauty: a wall with arched openings stretched along its entire length.
There were two hundred and seventy people of the Biysk garrison and a disabled team. After the abolition of the fortress as a military facility, the soldiers' barracks was given over to the detention of criminals in 1842. The building was rebuilt and repaired many times, and in December 1919 the prison was burned down by partisans. So the historical soldier's barracks ceased to exist for a long time. Numerous excavations were carried out on its ruins in the 90s of the twentieth century, and the materials found adorn the exposition of the museum.
Ober officer's house
Four officers of the Biysk battalion, who served in the garrison of the fortress, lived in this stone house. The one-story building with two entrances and eleven windows on the main facade was built simply, but, as was customary in those days, not without frills. Roofing with ventilation and gaps between the slopes, vestibules with washrooms and beautiful triangular stoves in living quarters are proof of this.
In total, there were nine rooms in the building, five of them were residential - on the one hand, kitchen and utility rooms on the other. In the nineteenth century, the chief officer's house was given over to a military infirmary. This building was gradually destroyed, and in 1905 a residential building was built in its place for the guards and their families. But this house also burned down. Only in 2000 the chief officer's house was rebuilt.
