Bolshoi Kamennyi Bridge

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First stone bridge in Moscow, as depicted by Fyodor Alekseev in the early 1800s.

Great Stone Bridge (Russian: Bolshoi Kamennyi most, Большой Каменный мост), crossing the Moskva River at the western end of the Kremlin, was the first permanent stone bridge in Moscow.

A "live" bridge of boats linked the Kremlin with Balchug on the same site as early as the 15th century. In 1643, Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich engaged an architect from Strassburg to design a stone bridge. Construction works dragged on for four decades and were not completed until 1682 (or 1692, depending on sources). The finally constructed eight-span bridge, measuring 22 meters wide by 170 meters long, was first named Vsekhsvyatsky ("all saints" in Russian) after the nearby All Saints Gate of the White Town of Moscow. On the river bank opposite to the Gate, there was a toll tower surmounted by two pyramidal tents.

In 1858, the ancient stone bridge was demolished and replaced by the first iron bridge in Moscow, which had only three spans instead of eight. The current 487-meter-long bridge was opened in 1938. The bridge, one of the most congested in Moscow, overlooks the Kremlin and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.