New data regarding the Kilia fortress

Abstract

Kilia medieval fortress, now non-existant, consisted of a stone citadel attributed to the Genoese, an outer belt of fortifications, built under Stephen the Great, and an Ottoman bastion fortress, designed and built in the end of the XVIII century. This article examines two documents referring to the Kilia fortress, discovered by the author in the Russian State Military-Historical Archive of Moscow. The first document is an undated plan for a Turkish bastion fortress developed, most likely, by the French engineer François Kauffer. The figure shows the Ottoman-Turkish names of bastions (Agha Bastion, Pasha Bastion, Unique/Unusual Bastion), gates (Stone Gate, Gate with a portcullis, Water Gate, Agha Gate), stone buildings (Sultan Bayezid’s Mosque), etc. The second document, also undated, shows four images of a stone fortress, built by the Moldovans. The iconographic source offers information on the layout of some towers (rectangular, hexagonal, octagonal and complex), the tower’s shape (prismatic with four, six and eight sides; cylindrical; with a rizalit; with an upper console floor, ending in the form of a turret), the shape of the roofs (hipped with four slopes, six and eight slopes, conical, gable roof or gable one with a ridge), the shape of the merlons (simple rectangular, rectangular with a gable ending located longitudinally or transversely), etc.