Water Tower in Kolomenskoye Residence, Architectural structure in Nagatinsky Zaton District, Russia
The Water Tower in Kolomenskoye Residence is a brick structure located within the large historical complex at Moscow's former royal estate. The building was part of the technical systems that supplied water to the wooden palace.
Built in the 1670s as the centre of a water-lifting system for the Tsar's court at Kolomenskoye, the tower housed a mechanism probably made by Bogdan Puchin of the Armoury, sent there in 1675 for this work. It stood on the road between Kolomenskoye and Dyakovo, by a dam in the ravine, and may have replaced the Dyakovo Gate of the old court.
The tower is also called Sokolina (Falcon) Tower, after a 19th-century legend that it housed hunting birds for the tsar's falconry. Today its interior holds the exhibition "The Sovereign's Water-Lifting Business: On the History of Water Supply in the 17th–20th Centuries."
The tower stands on the road between Kolomenskoye and Dyakovo, by the ravine dam. Inside, the ground floor is entered through the wide passage arches; the upper tier is reached by stairs in the side sections of the lower block. The water-lifting mechanism itself is gone, but a bricked-up doorway in the upper east facade once led onto the flat roof of the east wing.
The water-lifting mechanism itself is gone and how it worked has never been established. What survives is a 2-metre-deep white-stone basin under the tower's eastern wing, with a narrow well in its floor that may have reached the aquifer, and two ceramic pipes running underground from it toward the Church of the Ascension and the village of Dyakovo.
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