Jo'Burg Days: The Life Of Bells
...hearing a distant bell across the meadows is a beautiful experience. Lonely or sad, cheerful or happy, bells have such a distinctive sound that it is easy to become dependent on their regular chimes and come to regard these inanimate objects as individual personalities...
Barbara Durlacher recalls the bells of England, Russia, Italy and Austria.
I recently received a letter from a friend who has returned to Britain after many years in Africa. She mentions how much she’s enjoying the sound of bells ringing across the countryside, and her pleasure is such that she’s now joined a bell-ringing group and is learning to ‘ring the changes’ at her local church. I understand her feelings completely; hearing a distant bell across the meadows is a beautiful experience. Lonely or sad, cheerful or happy, bells have such a distinctive sound that it is easy to become dependent on their regular chimes and come to regard these inanimate objects as individual personalities.
About ten years ago I visited Russia and whilst doing the tourist rounds enjoyed a wonderful tour of the Kremlin. There I saw a huge bell with a curious history which, apart from its historical significance, is also a testament to the achievements of the Russian metalsmiths of the early to mid-1700s.
Weighing two hundred tons, this great object is known as the Tsar Bell and is a companion piece to the equally huge and ornately decorated Tsar Cannon. The craftsmanship and skill of the early metalsmiths who constructed these two amazing objects was astonishingly sophisticated for the time, but sadly their metal working skills were not equalled by other branches of Russian technology.
At that time, bells occupied a very special place in Russian life, and apart from their early significance as time keepers, were used to warn of enemy invasions, fire or insurrection. They were considered to have extra-sensory perception and to have an understanding of human motivation and to feel pain. Every village had bells and relied on them to regulate the passing of the hours, to call the workers from the fields and to celebrate and mourn births, marriages and deaths. But the Tsar Bell in the Kremlin had an even greater significance, as it was considered to represent the spirit of Moscow, and as such, was responsible for whatever happened to the city.
During the great bell’s construction, it fell into the casting pit and was badly cracked, causing an 11-ton section to fall off. The damage has never been fixed, as it was too difficult to re-forge the great object, and a century passed before it was lifted from the pit and placed into the position it now occupies alongside the enormous cannon. In all essentials it is useless and has never worked; in fact, it does not even have a clapper, but it is still venerated. In earlier times, many Russians thought that bells had souls, so if a bell failed in its duty, it was soundly whipped, probably with that dreadful sounding implement called the ‘knout’, and placed in ‘isolation’ for a prescribed period to repent of its misdeeds.
This would happen if the bell failed to warn the people of the approach of the Mongol hordes. So, if this occurred, after the invasion was repelled and things had settled down, the bell was given a good whipping and placed in isolation for several months!
The Tsar Cannon
Standing within a few yards of the Tsar Bell, the Tsar Cannon is another curiosity of the Moscow Kremlin. It was built in 1586 during the reign of Fyodor, the imbecile son of Ivan the Terrible, but despite its inordinate length and ornate decorations - it is more than five metres long [15ft] with a calibre of 890 mm - it has never been fired. Alongside the cannon lie a large pile of cannon balls, about the size of today’s American bowling ball, but their calibre is too small for this cannon and they are only for decoration, and if the correct shot was displayed, the cannon balls would be the size of small wine casks! The haut-relief on the barrel of the cannon shows a mythical Prince Fyodor fighting off his enemies and in another scene a fierce Russian lion slays a snake which represents Russia’s enemies.
Touring around Italy and Venice, I was thrilled by the constant music of the bells, although their loud clanging was disconcerting in the early morning when they summoned people to work. They also heralded the noonday break for lunch and were so numerous and omnipresent that they really did seem to have a life of their own. Sometimes it seemed they rang out messages only the locals understood, probably to indicate Saint’s Days and special holidays. At the first melodious clang of the bell, there would be an accompanying clatter of pigeons taking to the air, and a trip across the waters to any of the small islands in the Venetian lagoon was often accompanied by the wonderful sound of bells ringing across the water. The canals and time-pocked buildings seem to welcome the daily chorus and their wonderful noise has been a cherished memory of that beautiful but fading city ever since.
In Austria, where there is not quite such a ‘concatenation of bells’ as one hears in Italy, the small mountain villages keep the tradition of tolling at noon-day, and bells on Sunday. European countries cherish their bells and this wonderful sound is so much a part of each town that often this is the first thing one remembers of a visit to Europe. When I lived in Cape Town years ago the sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer five times a day from the Bokaap and across the Cape Flats always moved me by the juxtaposition of Islam on the ‘assumed Europeanism’ of this southernmost tip of the African continent.
