Tozhok: Provincial Treasure

For all of the changes, positive and negative, wrought by this century in russia, the central russian provinces still contain towns that seem to have survived the onslaught of faceless architecture and industrialization. Kaluga and Kolomna, both on the Oka River south of Moscow, are prime examples, although they too have recently felt the heavy hand of modern development. However, few provincial towns can rival Torzhok, situated on the Tvertsa River in Tver Province, for the quiet beauty of its landscape. Its many stately churches, houses, and old shops seem derived from an earlier epoch of prosperous estates and gentry culture. Indeed, the modest, intimate scale of its central streets belies the fact that the town has a rather sizeable population of 50,000 inhabitants.

Situated some 60 kilometers to the west of Tver and near the mid-point of the highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, Torzhok is among the oldest settlements in central Russia. The earliest recorded mention of Torzhok appears in an ancient chronicle under the year 1139—earlier than the putative founding date of Moscow, 1147. As in the case of Moscow, there were probably Slavic settlements on the site by the 10th century, and the town’s oldest monastery, dedicated to Saints Boris and Gleb, is considered to have been founded in 1038. Yet, by the iron logic of written documents, the first reference to Torzhok in 1139 is taken as the date of the town’s founding.

From the outset, Torzhok’s favorable location made it a place of active commerce. Its very name comes from the word for “trading site,” and the town was closely connected to the leading center of early medieval Russian trade, the city-state of Novgorod (see Russian Life, Oct/Nov 1998). Merchants from Torzhok provided Novgorod with much of its essential grain, and it is estimated that by the beginning of the 13th century, as many as 2,000 Novgorodians regularly visited Torzhok to conduct trade. The town also served as a defensive bulwark in Novgorod’s southeastern territory.

Because of its economic and geographic importance, Torzhok was frequently the target of powers hostile to Novgorod, including other Russian principalities, such as Tver. The most dramatic and ruinous event in the city’s medieval history was its heroic resistance to a siege by the Mongols in 1238. Although hopelessly outnumbered, the town’s defenders held their ramparts for two weeks. The inevitable outcome was the complete destruction of Torzhok and its inhabitants. Yet some historians claim that this unexpectedly stout resistance saved Novgorod itself from a devastating attack.

The rise of Muscovite power in the 15th century ultimately brought an end to Novgorod’s independence in the 1480s. In 1478 Torzhok entered the domains of Moscow’s ruler Ivan III (the Great). Moscow recognized Torzhok’s importance by rebuilding the latter’s kremlin (fortress) walls, with eleven towers. These walls lasted until the 18th century, when, no longer needed and in a dilapidated state, they were leveled. A few traces of the ramparts are still visible near the central area of town, between the Tvertsa River and its small tributary, the Zdorovets. Yet with the decline of Novgorod, Torzhok lost much of its commercial significance and became just another town in Moscow’s orbit.

After the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703, however, Torzhok experienced a revival of its fortunes, as the town became a major shipment point for supplies moving once again to the northwest—not to Novgorod, but to the new imperial capital. This commerce also stimulated local agriculture and the estates that depended upon it. Furthermore, the town’s central place on the new post road between the old and new capitals reinvigorated local crafts production.

The post road also brought a steady stream of the rich and famous through Torzhok. In the 1770s, Catherine the Great commissioned the architect Matvei Kazakov to build a small “Transit Palace” there, as she did in other major towns along her route between the two capitals. In the early 19th century, Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet (see Russian Life, June/July 1999) visited Torzhok several times, and Anna Petrovna Kern, the inspiration for one of Pushkin’s best-known love lyrics, is buried in the nearby village of Prutnya. Other prominent writers such as Alexander Radishchev, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, and Leo Tolstoi also visited Torzhok. Not just a way station, Torzhok had become a modest cultural center in its own right.

By the beginning of the 19th century, favorable economic circumstances brought Torzhok to the apogee of its prosperity. The gentry culture of the surrounding estates and the merchant culture of the town not only contributed to the relative well-being of Torzhok (bearing in mind that the majority of the region’s population still consisted of enserfed peasants), but also led to architectural revival. It affected almost every aspect of the town’s formerly uninspiring appearance.

Like other provincial towns during this period, Torzhok had begun to rebuild itself in the late 1700s. Catherine the Great’s drive to transform Russian provincial life by bringing order into its city plans may ultimately have produced superficial results in a social and political sense. But from an aesthetic perspective, towns such as Kaluga, Tver, and Kostroma gained a remarkable mixture of classical harmony and functionality in new marketplaces, churches, and government buildings situated on carefully measured boulevards.

Torzhok also benefited from these ideas of classical harmony in such areas as the design of a new central square and arcaded market buildings, flanked by adminstrative buildings. In addition, many of the town’s more prosperous residents rebuilt their houses in stuccoed brick according to new model plans, promulgated by the authorities in order to create a greater appearance of order and prosperity in provincial towns. A number of these houses still exist, and although most of them are badly in need of proper maintenance, they contribute much to the 19th-century ambience of Torzhok.

The most noticeable evidence of the town’s transformation in the early 19th century is the number of new churches. For example, the Convent of the Resurrection, founded at the end of the 16th century on one of the bluffs overlooking the Tvertsa River, was completely rebuilt in a neoclassical style between the late 18th century and 1840. It remains one of the more interesting neoclassical ensembles in the Russian provinces. Most of the town’s parish churches were also built during the same period. And in 1815-1822 Torzhok’s major cathedral, the Transfiguration of the Savior, was rebuilt to a plan by the great Petersburg architect Carlo Rossi. The neoclassical cathedral’s bright yellow walls with white trim make it one of the most prominent features of the center of town.

But the dominant feature in the landscape of historic Torzhok is the Monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb, reputed to have been founded by the monk Efrem, who had served as the stablehand of Prince Boris, one of the earliest martyrs of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1015 Boris and Gleb were killed by their brother Sviatopolk of Kiev, and apparently Efrem’s own brother, Georgii, was also killed in the attack. After their death, Efrem is supposed to have returned to his native area, near what would become Torzhok. There he began a refuge for pilgrims, and two years later—in 1038, according to church accounts—he founded the monastery and dedicated it to his former patrons, the young martyred princes.  After the death of Efrem, in 1053, his disciples continued the work of the monastery, which flourished.

Like most Russian monasteries, the Torzhok Monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb was built primarily of logs. But by the late 17th century, a few brick buildings appeared, such as the Church of the Presentation (1673), with a bell tower and refectory hall. During the Petrine era, the small Church of the Entry into Jerusalem was rebuilt (1717).

Yet none of these picturesque structures prepares for the excellence of the next phase, at the end of the 18th century, when the monastery acquired one of the greatest monuments of Russian neoclassicism. In 1785 work began on the rebuilding of the main monastery church, dedicated to Saints Boris and Gleb. Its designer was Nikolai Lvov, one of the best Russian architects active in the reign of Catherine the Great. Although based in St. Petersburg, Lvov was thoroughly familiar with the culture of the Russian provinces, and designed a number of estate houses, including the great mansion at Znamenskii-Raek, near Torzhok. His commission to design the new Church of Saints Boris and Gleb is in itself testimony to the wealth of Torzhok at this time. In the design of this church, completed in 1796, Lvov had achieved that most difficult of tasks: to endow a large structure with perfect geometric proportions and an elegantly simple architectural form.

The monastery’s wealth found further expression with the construction, over the main entrance gate of the new Church of the Miraculous Icon of the Savior. This church in turn supported a high bell tower whose dramatic silhouette is Torzhok’s most visible landmark. Later in the 19th century, the monastery walls gained the elaborate pseudo-gothic Svechny Tower (1868-74) overlooking the river.

Like so many other Russian monasteries, this magnificent, colorful ensemble was fated to undergo a sombre transformation during the Soviet period; for not only were its churches closed, but the monastery was turned into a transit prison in the GULag system of labor camps. No one knows how many died within its walls, but during my visit in 1995 a workman on the site brought me a large fragment of a human skull and said that such remains from this century are frequently uncovered on the territory of the monastery.

With the altering of trade and industrial patterns in the 19th century, Torzhok’s prosperity waned, and, by the end of the century, it had again slipped into the status of minor provincial town, a faded beauty. But the town was not fated to escape the cataclysms of this century. 

After years of slaughter and defeat on the eastern front during the First World War, Russia’s war-weary, disillusioned populace turned first against the tsarist regime, in March of 1917, and then against the war policy of Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government in the fall of 1917. Torzhok was no exception. Indeed, because of its location near two rail lines, the town served as quarters for the several thousand soldiers of the 293rd infantry regiment during WWI. After some units were shipped to the front to continue a bitterly unpopular war, disaffection spread among the remaining soldiers, who rallied to the support of the new soldiers’ councils, or soviets. Torzhok thus became one of many flash points that led to support for the Bolshevik coup.

In the aftermath of the civil war, Torzhok returned to a semblance of economic life. The town experienced growth in industries involved with metal working and railroads. But this progress was cut short in the fall of 1941, when the town suddenly found itself near the front lines to the north of Moscow. During the latter half of October, German aviation subjected the town to an intense bombing that destroyed or burned out over 1,000 houses and most of the central market area. Only in the beginning of February 1942 were inhabitants allowed back into town to begin the slow process of rebuilding.

In view of the harsh and tragic events that have swept through Torzhok in this century, it is all the more remarkable that one of Russia’s most interesting examples of wooden church architecture, the log Church of the Ascension, has survived on its original site. The church has been frequently repaired since its construction in the mid-17th century, yet it is a miracle that its soaring tower of octagons has also survived—and on a site so close to the steep bank of the Tvertsa River.

Those who love Russian wooden architecture will find other examples preserved at a park on the grounds of the former country estate of Vasilyovo, just outside of Torzhok. The park is situated within a landscape of exquisite beauty, and faces another estate, Mitino, just across the Tvertsa River. In addition to the log churches, houses, and other buildings assembled on the site, the park has some remains from the Vasilyevo estate, such as an ingenious stone bridge designed by Nikolai Lvov in the late 18th century. 

One interesting surprise is that Vasilyovo also now contains a large kennel, where borzois are professionally raised and bred. Although it may not say much about the current economic state of this region, it is gratifying and encouraging to see these beautiful animals once again within the peaceful landscape of the park. One can also hope that, despite all the trials of this century, the history beauty of Torzhok will flourish in these more peaceful times.  RL

William C. Brumfield is Professor of Slavic Studies at Tulane University. A leading authority on Russian architecture and an accomplished photographer, he is a regular contributor to Russian Life. His article on Kizhi appeared in our August/September 1999 issue. He is also author of several books on Russian architecture, including Lost Russia: Photographing the Ruins of Russian Architecture and Landmarks of Russian Architecture (available through Access Russia, ph. 800-639-4301).