A bird with a human head and other horror stories: Moscow legends about the Sukharev Tower

Stories about the famous Sukharev Tower stand out among Moscow legends. The tower was located at the intersection of the present-day Garden Ring, Sretenka Street and Prospekt Mira, from the late 17^th century to 1934. It was the symbol of Peter the Great’s rescue from Princess Sophia and a source of horror stories. The tower was used for firefighting purposes, and in the early 20^th century, it housed the Moscow Municipal Museum, later known as the Museum of Moscow.

This museum has preserved the stories about the tower in a book called Sukharev Tower (1692-1926): Folk Legends, Restoration and Current Condition written in 1926 by Director of the Moscow Municipal Museum Pyotr Sytin, a historian who specialised in Moscow studies. You can read the most interesting legends in this article.

The first legend about the Sukharev Tower came about shortly after the tower was built in 1695. Rumour had it that Peter the Great initiated the construction in gratitude for the protection court officer Lavrenty Sukharev’s streltsy regiment provided for him from his elder sister, Princess Sophia, when Peter was very young.

The architect was Mikhail Choglokov, who built the Kremlin Arsenal. The work involved two phases. First, the two-floor stone Sretenskiye Gates and chambers above them replaced the existing wooden structure. The so-called rapier chamber used to host fencing classes. Other chambers accommodated Sukharev’s streltsy regiment. Above the ceiling was the base of the tented roof with a clock. The third floor was finished in 1698-1701 after Peter the Great returned from Europe. Finally completed, the tower measured 64 metres in height, becoming Moscow’s second dominant architectural landmark after the Kremlin’s Ivan the Great Bell Tower.

The beginning of the 18^th century gave rise to new urban legends about the tower’s new resident, Jacob Bruce. Folktales describe Peter the Great’s associate Field Marshal Jacob Bruce, a descendant of the Scottish royal family, as a sorcerer, astrologist and the master of the mysterious tower, the elements and demons. Muscovites gossiped about an iron bird with a human head, which carried Bruce to the tsar, and about a mute girl that would serve the tsar’s guests and fall apart into flower buds at the end of the evening.

However, Jacob Bruce was not a sorcerer, but a scientist and one of the most educated people of his time. He studied astronomy, mathematics, chemistry and physics. In 1696, Bruce compiled a map of the Russian lands from Moscow to Asia Minor, and in 1707 made a map of the starry sky called The Celestial Globe and Celestial Sphere. He set up an observatory on one of the tower’s upper floors, which had “spectator stands,” sextants, quadrants and a huge celestial globe made by Willem Blaeu.

After Bruce’s death, the tower would house the Admiralty and later came under the control of city authorities. In 1829, the second floor accommodated a huge reservoir that collected water from the Mytishchi water pipeline. The Sukharev Tower stopped functioning as a water tower in the 1890s due to the construction of Krestovskiye Towers. Before the October Revolution, the building was home to the city archives, chapel, electric transformer station, compressor station and gatehouse of the tower warden.

In 1925, the tower was turned over to the Moscow Municipal Museum, which changed names several times before it became the Museum of Moscow as we call it today.

The work to convert the building into a museum involved the museum’s director, Pyotr Sytin, a famous historian who specialised in Moscow studies. In 1934, the Sukharev Tower was razed as it hindered the development of a transport route. Numerous protests by the science and arts community trying to save the landmark were in vain. Fragments of the tower were transported to the Kolomenskoye Museum Reserve and  its window casings were built into the wall of the Donskoi Monastery.