Exile Bell of Uglich
| Exile Bell of Uglich | |
|---|---|
 The Exile Bell on display in the Church of St. Dmitry on Blood, Uglich | |
| Material | Bronze |
| Weight | 319.41 kilograms (704.2 lb) |
| Created | Late 15th century (disputed) |
| Present location | Uglich State Historical, Architectural and Art Museum, Uglich, Russia |
The Exile Bell of Uglich (Russian: Ссыльный угличский колокол, also Uglich Exile Bell or Uglich Alarm Bell) is a church bell that was "punished" and exiled to Siberia in 1592 for sounding the alarm after the death of Tsarevich Dmitry, the young son of Ivan the Terrible. The bell was publicly flogged, mutilated by having its clapper removed and its ear cut off, and then banished to Tobolsk, where it remained for roughly three centuries. It was returned to Uglich in 1892 and is now displayed in the Church of St. Dmitry on Blood as part of the Uglich State Historical, Architectural and Art Museum.[1]
Background
On 15 May 1591, the eight-year-old Tsarevich Dmitry, last surviving son of Ivan the Terrible and designated heir to the throne, was found dead with his throat cut in the courtyard of the palace in Uglich, where he lived with his mother Maria Nagaya under the guardianship of Moscow-appointed officials.[1] Dmitry's mother and her relatives believed he had been murdered on the orders of the boyar Boris Godunov, who governed Russia on behalf of the feeble Tsar Feodor. They ordered the alarm bell of the Transfiguration Cathedral to be rung.[2]
The sexton Maxim Kuznetsov and the widowed priest Fedot, nicknamed Ogurets ("Cucumber"), rang the alarm at the order of Tsarina Maria Nagaya.[3] The sound drew the townspeople to the cathedral square, where a crowd formed and killed several people accused of murdering the tsarevich, including Mikhail Bityagovsky, the Moscow official assigned to oversee Dmitry's household.[2]
"Crime" and punishment
Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky, dispatched to Uglich to investigate, concluded that Dmitry had died accidentally during an epileptic seizure. The authorities then imposed collective punishment on the town: around 200 Uglich residents were executed and approximately 60 families were exiled to Siberia, mostly to Pelym.[1][3]
The bell itself was sentenced on 1 April 1592. As the literal instigator of the riot, it was thrown down from the Spasskaya bell tower, its clapper was torn out, one of its ears (the mounting loop by which a bell is hung) was cut off, and it was publicly flogged with 12 strikes of the knout on the cathedral square.[4][3] It was then exiled to Siberia together with the banished families. Accounts state that the exiles dragged the bell themselves on a cart for nearly a year along the road to Tobolsk.[4]
The punishment of inanimate objects was not without precedent in Russian history. In 1478, Ivan III had removed and bound the veche bell of Novgorod after conquering the city, and in 1510 Vasili III ordered the ears cut and tongue torn from the Pskov veche bell.[4] As the historian Daniel Beer notes, the bell's punishment mirrored the corporal penalties inflicted on the human exiles: flogging, mutilation, and banishment.[1]
Exile in Tobolsk
The bell arrived in Tobolsk in 1593. The local military governor, Prince Fyodor Lobanov-Rostovsky, had it locked in the prikaznaya izba (the administrative office) and ordered the inscription "first inanimate exile from Uglich" to be marked on it.[3][5]
At some point the bell was moved to the bell tower of the Church of the All-Merciful Saviour in the hill district of the city, and later to the bell tower of the Sophia Cathedral in the Tobolsk Kremlin. There, because of its loud and sharp tone, it was used to strike the hours and as a fire alarm rather than for liturgical purposes.[5] The original cathedral bell tower, built between 1683 and 1685, collapsed around 1780. The bell was placed on a wooden frame between the Archierei House and the cathedral, where it narrowly escaped melting during a major city fire on the night of 27-28 April 1788.[5] In 1797, after a new bell tower was built, the bell was raised back up. It was likely during this period that a lengthy inscription was carved into the bell describing its history, probably on the orders of Archbishop Varlaam or the abbot Margarit, who oversaw construction for the archbishop.[5]
The carved inscription reads:
"This bell, in which the alarm was rung at the killing of the pious Tsarevich Dmitry in 1593, was sent from the town of Uglich to Siberia, into exile, to the town of Tobolsk, to the Church of the All-Merciful Saviour at the market, and afterwards on the Sophia bell tower was the hour-bell."[5]
In late 1836 or early 1837, Archbishop Athanasius of Tobolsk had the bell moved to a small wooden canopy beside the Krestovskaya Archiepiscopal Church. The relocation served two purposes: to display it as a historical curiosity for the planned visit of the heir to the throne, Alexander Nikolaevich (who visited Tobolsk in 1837 but did not view the bell), and to provide the rebuilt Krestovskaya Church with a bell for calling worshippers.[5] It remained there for decades, drawing interest from visitors. On 24 July 1868, Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich inspected it during a visit to Tobolsk.[5]
The Decembrists, exiled to Siberia after the 1825 uprising, viewed the bell as a fellow rebel.[6] The ethnographer Ippolit Zavalishin, writing in 1862, called the bell "an unquelled accuser" and proposed that it be returned to Uglich and mounted on a monumental pedestal as an act of moral reconciliation with the past.[7]
The church historian Alexander Sulotsky, in an 1869 article, argued against returning the bell, writing that it was one of only two major historical attractions in Tobolsk (alongside the Yermak Monument) and that in Uglich, surrounded by other relics connected to Tsarevich Dmitry, it would be overshadowed.[5]
Sulotsky described the bell in 1869 as follows: its ear was cut (not torn); it produced a sharp, loud sound; it weighed 19 poods and 20 funts (319.41 kg); the copper surface was grey; the wall thickness was one and a third vershoks (5.9 cm); the circumference at the lip was 3 arshins and 3 quarters (2.7 m); the edges were chipped and dented from repeated moving and rough handling.[5]
Return to Uglich
In December 1849, a group of 40 Uglich residents petitioned the Minister of Internal Affairs for permission to bring the bell back from Tobolsk at their own expense. The initiative came from local historians and antiquarians, the merchants Ivan and Vasily Serebrennikov and the schoolteacher Fyodor Kissel.[6] The Holy Synod was consulted and requested verification from the dioceses of Yaroslavl and Tobolsk. Finding the evidence unsatisfactory, the Synod declared on 11 May 1851 that the available information did not confirm the bell was the same one rung at the killing of Tsarevich Dmitry, and the petition was denied.[8]
The matter was raised again in 1888 by the Uglich resident Leonid Solovyov. After prolonged correspondence, Emperor Alexander III granted permission, and in 1892, coinciding with the 300th anniversary of the bell's exile, it was formally "pardoned" and returned.[4][6] Before the bell left Tobolsk, a Warsaw-based student named Florian Lyakhmayer made a papier-mache replica, which was installed in a specially built small bell tower in the Tobolsk Kremlin; that replica is now held by the Tobolsk Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve.[9]
A delegation of Uglich residents collected the bell from Tobolsk, paying 600 rubles, and arrived by steamship at Uglich on the night of 20 May 1892. The bell became one of the first exhibits of the Uglich Museum of Antiquities (now the Uglich State Historical, Architectural and Art Museum) and is displayed in the Church of St. Dmitry on Blood to this day.[6][9]
Question of authenticity
Doubts about whether the bell in Uglich is the original have circulated since the 19th century. Some accounts held that the real bell had broken during the journey to Siberia, or melted in the 1677 Tobolsk fire, or was destroyed when the Sophia Cathedral bell tower collapsed. The 1677 fire in particular is documented in Siberian chronicles, which record that cathedral bells melted in the blaze.[3]
In the 1980s, a debate took place between Uglich researchers A.M. Lobashkov, who argued the bell was not authentic, and A.V. Kulagin, who defended its authenticity. In 1983, Kulagin arranged for metallographic and chemical analyses at the central laboratory of the Chaika factory in Uglich. The analysis found the bell's bronze composition to be 82.62% copper, 15.83% tin, and 1.55% impurities. Kulagin concluded that the bell was cast by a highly skilled founder working in Uglich in the late 15th century, and that the authenticity question was settled in his favor.[6]
In 2019, specialists from Novosibirsk began a new investigation using 3D scanning and updated chemical analysis to determine whether the bell survived the 1677 fire, as archival documents suggest it may not have.[10]
In literature
The poet Natalia Konchalovskaya devoted several stanzas to the bell in her cycle "Our Ancient Capital" (Russian: Наша древняя столица), recounting its punishment and return:
With them the disgraced bell
On that long sorrowful road
Through the snows was sent away,
So that it would never ring.
So that it would please no ear,
They tore off its ear,
So it would get used to silence:
They ripped out its copper tongue,
And for further disgrace
They punished it like a thief:
It was publicly displayed
And flogged twelve times...
The rebels were forgotten by the people:
No trace remains of their graves,
But from that far-off exile
Came the disgraced bell.
From Tobolsk to Uglich it
Was returned.[11]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a short prose piece, "The Bell of Uglich" (Russian: Колокол Углича, 1996-1999), describing a visit to the bell: "And they offer me to strike it. I strike, once. And what a wondrous hum arises in the church, how many-layered this blending of deep tones, from antiquity toward us, the hastily foolish and clouded souls."[12]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Beer, Daniel (2016). The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars. Allen Lane. pp. 1–3. ISBN 9780241957523. Search this book on
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "1592: The Uglich Bell". Executed Today. 1 April 2018. Retrieved 12 June 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Lobashkov, A.M. (1988). История ссыльного колокола [History of the Exile Bell]. Yaroslavl: Верхневолжское книжное издательство. Search this book on
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Manaev, Georgy (9 May 2021). "How Russians executed BELLS". Russia Beyond. Archived from the original on 17 June 2026. Retrieved 12 June 2026.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 Sulotsky, A.I. (1871). "Замечательные по Сибири колокола" [Notable Bells of Siberia]. Readings in the Imperial Society of Russian History and Antiquities (1): 72–84.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Kulagin, A.V.; Kulagin, V.A. (2006). История Углича [History of Uglich]. Uglich: Музей истории Углича. Search this book on
- ↑ Zavalishin, I.I. (1862). Описание Западной Сибири [Description of Western Siberia]. 1. Moscow: Типография Грачева и комп. pp. 317–319. Search this book on
- ↑ Pylyaev, M.I. (1890). "Исторические колокола" [Historical Bells]. Исторический вестник.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 "Church of St. Dmitry on the Blood". Advantour. Archived from the original on 17 June 2026. Retrieved 12 June 2026.
- ↑ Melnik, Anna (1 August 2019). "Специалисты раскроют тайну угличского ссыльного набатного колокола" [Specialists will reveal the secret of the Uglich exile alarm bell]. Vesti Yaroslavl (GTRK) (in Russian). Archived from the original on 17 June 2026. Retrieved 12 June 2026.CS1 maint: Unrecognized language (link)
- ↑ Konchalovskaya, Natalia (1953). Наша древняя столица [Our Ancient Capital]. Search this book on
- ↑ Solzhenitsyn, Alexander (2006). Рассказы и крохотки [Stories and Miniatures]. 1. Moscow: Время. p. 559. Search this book on
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