Текст на английском про Кремль

The Kremlin is in the centre of Moscow. It is very old and very big.

The Kremlin has got red walls and twenty towers. There are red stars on five towers.

The Spasskaya Tower has got a big clock. People can hear it on New Year's Eve.

There are beautiful churches in the Kremlin. They have got golden domes.

Red Square is next to the Kremlin. A lot of tourists come here every day.

Last spring our class went on a school trip to Moscow. The most interesting part of the trip was the Kremlin.

We entered through the Kutafya Tower and walked to Cathedral Square. There are three famous cathedrals there, and their golden domes were shining in the sun. Our guide told us that Russian tsars were crowned in the Assumption Cathedral.

Then we saw the Tsar Cannon and the Tsar Bell. The bell is bigger than a car, but nobody has ever rung it, because a large piece broke off. My friend Dima took a funny photo next to it.

After lunch we visited the Armoury Chamber. It was the most beautiful museum I have ever seen, with crowns, carriages and jewellery.

I was very tired in the evening, but happy. Next time I am going to climb the Ivan the Great Bell Tower.

The word 'kremlin' means a fortress inside a Russian city, and many old towns, such as Kazan, Novgorod and Nizhny Novgorod, have one. However, when people around the world say 'the Kremlin', they usually mean the one in Moscow, which stands on Borovitsky Hill above the Moscow River.

The first wooden fortress appeared there in the twelfth century, soon after Moscow was first mentioned in the chronicles in 1147. In the fourteenth century Prince Dmitry Donskoy replaced the wooden walls with white stone ones. The red brick walls and towers that we see today were built at the end of the fifteenth century by architects who were invited from Italy.

For centuries the Kremlin was the heart of the Russian state. Tsars lived in its palaces, and its cathedrals were used for coronations and royal weddings. Although the capital moved to Saint Petersburg in the eighteenth century, coronations still took place in the Kremlin.

Today the Kremlin is both the official residence of the head of state and a huge museum complex, which has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with Red Square since 1990.

I have walked along the Kremlin walls in the Alexander Garden many times. If I visit Moscow again, I will finally buy a ticket to the Diamond Fund.

Few buildings have become as closely identified with a country as the Moscow Kremlin. In newspapers around the world its name is routinely used as shorthand for the Russian state, much as 'Downing Street' stands for the British government. This habit, while convenient, tends to obscure the fact that the Kremlin is first and foremost an extraordinary architectural ensemble with a history of more than eight centuries.

What strikes most visitors is the mixture of styles. The walls and towers, designed by Italian masters in the late fifteenth century, resemble the castles of Milan, yet the tent-shaped roofs added to the towers two centuries later are unmistakably Russian. Inside the walls, Renaissance details sit alongside traditional onion domes, and the eighteenth-century Senate building introduces a restrained classicism.

The Kremlin has also been a witness to dramatic events. Occupied by Polish forces during the Time of Troubles, damaged by fire and explosions in 1812 during Napoleon's occupation of Moscow, and partly rebuilt in the Soviet period, it has been repeatedly destroyed and restored. Each layer of this turbulent history can still be read in its stones.

Some argue that a complex which serves as a working seat of power cannot be a truly open museum, and it is true that parts of the territory remain closed to visitors. Nevertheless, millions of people every year walk through Cathedral Square, admire the icons painted by Andrei Rublev and Theophanes the Greek, and listen to the chimes of the Spasskaya Tower.

Had the Kremlin been merely a fortress, it would probably have been abandoned once its walls lost their military value. Instead, it has survived precisely because each generation has found new meaning in it, which, to my mind, is the surest sign of a living monument.