The Tower They Never Finished Tearing Down

That white spire in front of you rises seventy-five meters above the water. It looks simply beautiful. But under the surface here lie streets, squares, house foundations. The water rose about fifteen to eighteen meters when, in nineteen forty, the Uglich reservoir was filled. Two-thirds of the town of Kalyazin sank to the bottom. And the bell tower stayed standing — a marker of how far Soviet progress was willing to go.

It took almost six years to build, back in the late eighteenth century, raised by serf stonemasons working for a local landowner named Ushakov. A few of their names survive: Ivanov-Rudelyov, Stepanov. The white, classical spire was meant to announce the wealth of the monastery and the merchants of the town — a landmark for boats on the Volga river. Well, a landmark it remained. Just not the kind anyone planned: until the nineteen-sixties, signal lights burned on the tower to guide ships across the flooded reservoir, and in the fog, boatmen would first see red lights glow through the milky haze, then a white ghost rising straight out of the water.

There was, in fact, an official order to dismantle the tower brick by brick before the flooding. It never happened — maybe there wasn't time, maybe it had already been listed as a protected monument by then. Soviet paperwork at its finest.

The artificial island beneath the tower wasn't properly built up and reinforced until the late nineteen-eighties — before that, the foundation was simply being worn away by ice, year after year. Today it's under restoration: fresh plaster, and an electronic bell system that rings on a schedule for visitors. Monastery bells, a Soviet warning beacon, digital chimes on a timer — three different eras, stacked in one tower.

They drowned the town for electricity. And the tower — the one thing they meant to erase — became the one thing that made it famous.

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