What is the Sheinov Bastion?

The faceted tower of the fortress wall once towered in the current city center. At different times, it or its location was called Vladislavov Bastion, Vladislavov Prolom, Faceted Tower, Kovalje Fortress, Round Tower, Small Shaft, Sigismundov Shanets, Sheinov Tower, Sheinov Bastion, Shein Prolom, Sheinov Bastion, Cereal Prolom.

On the one hand, because the breach in this place was made under the leadership of the voivode Mikhail Shein during the war of 1632-34, on the other hand, because the troops of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were defending, before the explosion, the Poles from the inside of the tower managed to pour a large earthen rampart, and on the third hand - because under Peter I in 1706-08, a bastion was poured on the site of the breach - a section of the fortress protected by a ravelin, and named after the engineer who fortified this site, "Kovalier fortress".

Part of the earthen fortification made by the Poles has survived to this day under the name Sheinov Bastion.

We will talk about this building in our Night poem about Smolensk. Excursions with a lantern on October 25 at 21.00.

This place, or rather quite possible course of battle on this place very impressively and extremely realistically described in his beautiful novel “Rainbow and Heather” Smolensk writer Oleg Ermakov:

Excerpt 16+ And before he arrived, Nikolaus saw a gaping, smoking hole in the wall. Incredibly, the Muscovites broke through this stronghold. And now they rushed into the hole, sparkling with sabers, teeth, white eyes, firing guns and pistols, with wild screams. The blue jaws of the Zholners were crowded by a wave, and from that side there was a wave of red Strelets caftans, and both waves clashed. Heads flew away. They just flew off like cabbage piles and got stuck with their mouths open and their eyes hatched in smoking bricks...

He climbed bricks higher into the hole, already littered with corpses, stepping on warm and soft bodies, grasping with one hand the sticky bloody bricks. The hole smoked blood, as if a piece of meat had been pulled out in a living wall.

A German came out to meet him, in a shell, helmet, with a pistol. He immediately aimed, wildly reducing his eyes on the nose and squinting one eye, and shot, but Nikolaus felt nothing, nothing at all, and immediately tried to cut the German, but he recoiled, rusting like a horse, showing yellow large teeth. Nikolaus roared in rage, grabbed a faithful coin and rushed at the German, cracked his helmet with a skull, receiving a tight slap of the brain directly in the face.

Nikolaus snick, too, but he was alive. And so he lay, transferring his spirit under a heavy corpse, coming to his senses... Then I heard the blood in the bricks. This he will remember for life: the sound of live streams on the ruins.