Koporye Fortress

The fortress is set on a limestone cape above the valley of the small Koporka River: the walls and four towers were laid at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries on the site of an earlier castle of the Order. The first fortification here was built of timber by the knights of the Livonian Order in 1240, but a year later Alexander Nevsky took and destroyed it, and the men of Novgorod raised stone walls at the end of the 13th century and then rebuilt them more than once. The present enclosure, up to fifteen metres high, and the round towers were already designed for defence with cannon. The masonry is all of local limestone, the walls stretch for more than four hundred metres and reach five metres in thickness at the base, and the towers rise some twenty metres. A narrow stone bridge on arches leads to the gate between two round towers — its last span was once a drawbridge. Koporye fell to the Swedes twice and returned to Russia for good under Peter I, and in 1763 the fortress was struck off the list of active ones. Inside the walls are the ruins of the Transfiguration Cathedral, which burned down in an accidental fire in 1962, and the burial vault of the Zinovievs, who owned Koporye for more than a century. The fortress became a museum in 2001, but in April 2013 it was closed to visitors because of the dangerous state of the masonry, and it is now viewed from the outside.

On the map