Photos

The Tsar's Canon, now on display in the Kremlin near Cathedral Square in Moscow. You can see its size from the people standing behind it, which gives it some scale. It was cast in 1586, and was for a long time the largest in the world; it is some 16 feet long and weighs 85,000 pounds. It was commissioned by Fyodor I, the son of Ivan the Terrible, who hired master craftsman Andrei Chokov to cast this giant, but unfortunately his measurements were somewhat off; it has never been fired because the giant canon balls, which are seen below, are too large to fit in the barrel! Oops...

This was taken with a small pocket camera when I was a teenager and the quality's not great because I had to scan it in, but this was an impressive feature I wanted to share... very Russian, I think... the detail and craftsmanship for such a mammoth canon is impressive.