The reserve is located on more than twenty hectares, the main museum of Kuzbass is the Kuznetsk fortress. The main part of the fortress is located on Ascension Mountain, which is part of the Stanovoi Mane, a mountain range that rises above the city of Novokuznetsk from the same district. The museum itself began its work in 1991 to study, preserve and promote such an interesting object as the Kuznetskaya fortress - a wonderful monument of the history of fortification, an object of cultural heritage of federal significance.
Territory
On the territory is located not only the Kuznetsk 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 fortifications can be visited by residents and visitors of the city for excursions. The preservation of these monuments is different, restoration work is ongoing.
Archeological monuments of all kinds are also located here. Investigations are still underway, and can not do without finds. The fortress Kuznetskaya has not yet been fully explored. The museum exposition through such surveys is constantly updated. It presents the military history of the region, and the materials of excavations of the prison, and the history of fortification lines, and the prison castle, which has also been on the territory of the fortress since the seventeenth century. The museum helps to promote military-patriotic traditions, collects folklore and supports popular culture.
Museum work
In December 1991, the museum opened, and its first employees settled on Narodnaya Street in a dilapidated building. Since the new 1992, not only a comprehensive study of the fortress has begun through archival and archaeological research, but also the restoration work has been widely developed. Ethnographic, archaeological and historical expeditions were organized to staff the museum's funds. So Kuznetsk fortress gained its rebirth.
In the spring of 1993, the museum moved to the house of the merchant Fonarev on Waterfall Street, where it is still located. At that time, the release of "Kuznetsk Antiquity", a periodical journal of local history, was launched. In 1994, the museum opened a scientific library with books from the collection of an archaeologist from the neighboring city of Prokopyevsk, M. G. Yelkin. Then the first exhibition dedicated to the principles of Siberian art was held.
Restoration
Next, an archive is formed, various exhibitions are created and held. In 1998, compensatory construction was carried out - large-scale reconstruction works. The Barnaul Gate and two stone half-bastions, a soldier’s barracks - this is what the Kuznetsk fortress was enriched with then. Novokuznetsk is a city of beautiful and glorious traditions, and from that moment it has become historically richer many times. It was here that the City Day holiday began to be held.
But this is far from all the good that began to happen on the territory of the Kuznetsk fortress. Metallurgists from the foundry of ZSMK made twelve exact copies of the fortress guns that had previously stood here on carriages, and two bronze mortars, which were also placed on the walls of the fortress. And in 2001, the same workshop presented the museum with two exact copies of the bronze mortars of Kugorn, which are now housed in a permanent exhibition. A year later, the fortress was expecting another gift - cast-iron pood and two-pound 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 the residents of Kuznetsk who were awarded the George Crosses. And the walls of the fortress itself again replenished with tools on field carriages with cast-iron and bronze trunks. In 2003, a plaster bust of 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 foundry of the West Siberian Metallurgical Plant. The museum exposition 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 - an artist of the naval ministry, who became famous in the second half of the nineteenth century. A portrait bas-relief and a memorial plate were made by the same metallurgists of the foundry.
The second stage of construction
For the first six months of 2008, the Kuznetsk fortress became even closer to its original appearance. Novokuznetsk conducted another large-scale work of compensatory construction. This time, the northern and southern grades were restored and the building was constructed according to the original drawings of the chief officer’s house. A wooden chapel was also laid out, which showed off here with its carved ornament in ancient times. The Ober Officer House hosted the main historical expositions along the Kuznetsk fort, the Kuznetsk fortress and the Kuznetsk defense line.
And an exposition on the ancient history of the region was built with great success in the soldiers’ barracks, where a variety of materials from excavations were collected, presented chronologically - from the Paleolithic, which transported the viewer to the twentieth millennium BC to the archaeological sites of the seventeenth century AD. The exposition included interesting historical reconstructions, which showed the ancient inhabitants of the region, the appearance of which was restored from the found skulls. Novokuznetsk residents are very fond of their museum.
Kuznetsk fortress
A fortress was built for twenty years, which is not so much for the nineteenth century, from 1800 to 1820. A system of fortifications continued here, the main purpose of which is to contain the aggression of China, which has always looked with lust (and even now!) At South Siberia and its truly fertile lands. However, in 1846 the military history of the Kuznetsk fortress was over: it was removed from the balance sheet by the War Ministry. She was reprofiled by organizing a prison for criminals, which existed in the fortress until 1919. And in the Civil War, all buildings related to the penitentiary system of tsarism were burned.
The prison itself was built long before the main fortress - this was the beginning of the seventeenth century. Its construction and helped the formation of the entire defensive system on Ascension Hill (previously it was called the Grave). All the fortifications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were earthen or wooden and had a tower inscription very traditional for those times: the towers were located around the perimeter of the city, that is, they defended not only the prison.
Before the formation of the city
The Ascension half-bastion of the Kuznetsk fortress is preserved with part of the wall and the remains of several towers. On the Grave Hill in the seventeenth century, this wall could have passed in exactly the same way as it was reconstructed in our days - with a dug ditch and an embanked shaft. It is precisely known that in 1717 an earthen citadel was located on the cape of this mountain. In 1689, the prison was proclaimed a city that defended this area from “attacks by the Kyrgyz and Kalmyks” (as the Tatar-Mongols, Chinese, Altai and Shorians were called then), by the highest permission of Tsarist Majesty.
For even greater fortification of the bastions, a second citadel was laid a little higher on the banks of the Tom River and north of the city, which was connected to the city by a wooden wall, and around the circumference from the land side the fortress was built of thick logs with driven poles. Even then, as the model of the Kuznetsk fortress shows, the wall had eight gates and amounted to almost two and a half versts. Four shafts of the citadel repeated the structure of the mountainous coast of Tom, bastions and two gates with wooden towers were located at the corners of the shafts. Inside the citadel in those days there was only a chapel, more than a single building. All gates were powerfully protected by guns. Now the museum "Kuznetsk Fortress" continues to work on this layout. 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 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 a linear border system of grandiose extent - from the Caspian to Altai. Therefore, the modernization of all Kuznetsk fortifications was prepared and approved by Emperor Paul I.
There should have been new earthen fortifications at the bottom of the Grave Mountain and on its top. In 1800, construction began, and by 1820 the Kuznetsk fortress was completely renovated. Novokuznetsk, whose history began and developed simultaneously with the life of this defense fortification, is now restoring precisely this variant of the location of the bastions.
What happened
The entire fortress took the form of an elongated rectangle, along the main perimeter of which there were ramparts with redans, to which ramps for guns were poured from the inside. There was an additional square redoubt at Cape Mogilnaya Gora, from which a long shaft with a redan led to the fortress. At the corners threatened the aggressors with half-bastions, lined with sandstone inside, and equipped with twenty-meter artillery sites.
Between the half-bastions, a three-story brick spy tower rose high. Defensive ditches and ramparts were fully formed. Of the pre-existing buildings, only the chapel has survived. The prisoners and civilian workers built and renovated the fortress.
Gray-haired old
Until 1806, as the museum-reserve established from archival documents, the Kuznetsk fortress had only one stone building - a one-story guardhouse with a high four-pitched 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 a facility for short-term arrest, but a guardhouse. This building was located near the Kuznetsk Gate. Usually, soldiers from a shift guard rested inside the building.
In 1810, the guardhouse was completely renovated, a brick stove was laid out for the soldiers, and wooden floors were arranged. When the fortress left the state of defense, the building was abandoned, rapidly dilapidated, and sold in 1869 for scrapping. Only in 1970 it was rebuilt. Equally old is a stone powder cellar with a gable roof with two extensions. Around it stood a powerful fence much higher than the cellar itself. In 1810, the turfy roof was blocked by stone slabs, a cornice was laid for the drainage of water.
Soldier Barracks
This brick building on a stone basement 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 dormer windows, and was divided vertically by a ventilation ledge. The entire barracks consisted of two parts, symmetrically isolated, with separate entrances. The room was heated by stoves. Bunk beds were located along the walls. Nevertheless, the building was not devoid of beauty: a wall with arched openings stretched along the entire length.
It housed two hundred and seventy people of the Biysk garrison and an invalid team. After the abolition of the fortress as a military structure, the soldier’s barracks was given up for the maintenance of criminal criminals in it in 1842. Many times the building was rebuilt and repaired, and in December 1919 the partisans burned the prison. So the historical soldiers' 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 adorned the museum's exposition.
Ober Officer House
In this stone house lived four officers of the Biysk battalion, who served in the garrison of the fortress. 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. Roofs with ventilation and gaps between the slopes, vestibules with washrooms and beautiful triangular stoves in residential premises are proof of this.
In total, the building had nine rooms, five of them 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 being destroyed, and in 1905 a residential house was built in its place for warders and their families. But this house soon burned down. Only in 2000, the chief officer’s house was rebuilt.