The Kremlin received its first chimes 600 years ago. As mediaeval chronicles have it, a clock tower was erected in the Kremlin, 1404, at the entrance to the private premises of Grand Duke Basil, son and heir of renowned Dimitri Donskoi.
Information about the first Spassky chimes differs. Some sources date it to 1491, others to 1614.
England's Christopher Halloway designed another, more sophisticated clock in 1624. Russian master craftsman Kirill Samoilov welded its bells.
The clock face had 24 figures originally. Peter the Great ordered it remade on the Western pattern, with twelve.
Emperor Nicholas I had the chimes set on a tune in the mid-19th century. The music, a church choral, changed to the "Internationale" after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.
The hands and figures were repaired in the 1960s, and the mechanism in 1974. The chimes stopped for an overhaul, June 1, 1999.
The clock face diameter exceeds six metres. Every figure is 72 centimetres long. The minute hand is three metres and 28 centimetres long, and the hour roughly three metres.
The chimes now play two tunes-"Hail!", magnificent chorus from Mikhail Glinka's opera "Ivan Susanin", and the national anthem to Alexander Alexandrov's music.
