Bells and Cannons

Hello. Today's story sounds like one long, sustained note: it opens with the ring of bells, breaks into the silence of cannon fire — and returns to ringing again. Because bronze, the metal that for centuries was cast into both bells and cannons, is really the same alloy: copper and tin. What shaped it wasn't nature but history — in peacetime it rang out over a city, in wartime it fired.

In the autumn of seventeen hundred, the Russian army suffered a disaster at Narva, a battle in what's now Estonia: in a single defeat, it lost almost all of its field artillery. Cannons were needed at once, and the treasury was desperately short of copper. So Peter the Great made a move his contemporaries saw as almost sacrilegious: on the fourth of February, seventeen-oh-one, he ordered a quarter of the bells taken down from every church and monastery across Russia and sent to be melted down. By summer, Moscow's Cannon Yard had gathered around ninety thousand poods of bell bronze — an old Russian weight, working out to nearly one and a half thousand tonnes of metal that not long before had been calling people to worship. The first cannons from that bronze were cast as early as the eleventh of March that same year, and by month's end there were twelve finished guns. Over the course of seventeen-oh-one altogether, about one hundred eighty tonnes of bronze were produced, cast into two hundred sixty-eight cannons.

It's worth imagining what Russia sounded like in those days. In towns and villages where, just the day before, the bells had rung out over the rooftops at the appointed hour, an unfamiliar silence fell: the bell towers stood empty, and the bronze that once filled them had become the barrels of new cannons, bound for war with Sweden. People coined their own name for what happened — not a flattering one. But it was these very guns that helped turn the tide of the Great Northern War, a conflict that began for Russia in humiliating defeat and ended in victory, with Russia winning its outlet to the Baltic Sea.

From there, the story came full circle — more than once. Over a century later, after the war against Napoleon in eighteen-twelve, the transformation ran in reverse. One of the bells on the bell tower of Ivan the Great in the Moscow Kremlin had been damaged during the war and was recast — and into the new alloy went bronze from captured French cannons, seized from Napoleon's army. The resulting bell, weighing around sixty-five tonnes, no longer sounded like a weapon but like a memory of victory: French bronze that had recently fired on Russian troops now called people to church with its peal.

Bronze walked the same road after other wars, too. After Russia's victory over Turkey in the war of eighteen seventy-seven to seventy-eight, a whole Column of Glory rose in St. Petersburg in front of Trinity Cathedral: twenty-eight metres tall, built from one hundred twenty-eight captured Turkish guns, stacked five rows deep. Cannons that could kill became a monument to peace — silent, but in its own way speaking as clearly as any bell.

That column had its own silence too, though: in nineteen-thirty, the Soviet government tore the monument down, and the bronze was melted once more — this time not into bells or cannons, but simply into raw material for the needs of a young state. Only in two thousand five was an exact replica of the column put up on the same spot — and the peal of history, silenced for seventy-five years, sounded again, if only in the form of a silent monument.

And so it goes: the very same bronze, over three centuries, has been a bell, a cannon, a bell again, cannons again, a monument, scrap metal — and a monument once more. It doesn't remember what it was yesterday. It simply waits to be melted down again — and for that next moment to decide whether we hear it as a gunshot or as a bell.

Anything at all — a building, a word, a habit you never questioned. moygid dot online.