Weapons: cold and artillery

The hall provides essential information on the fortress history, revealing its armed potential, and its compliance with the military development of that time. It demonstrates samples of cold and artillery weapons of the 14th – early 16th centuries.
Cold weapons are represented with arrowheads and mass finds of crossbow bolts, identical to finds of the same time from Lithuania. There are similar crossbow bolts in many Lithuanian museums.

Iron mace with a handle, lead-poured, is a unique find of both a cold weapon and a power sign of koshovyi otaman and hetman. It is pear-shaped, and divided into eight segments, each decorated with an openwork ribbon along the segment contour. The mace weighs 250 g. It is the first archeological find of the 15th century mace from the Southern Ukraine fortresses.

Artillery weapons are presented with bombard barrel fragments. It belonged to the so-called Genoese “medium bombard” type, according to Ph.D. O.E. Malchenko. The researcher does not exclude the fact that the bombard belongs to Lithuanian artillery. He also notes that such bombards, due to their design and functional qualities, were fixed on a wooden deck. In our case, the bombard was found on a wooden platform made of eight boards fastened with small nails.

Among other artillery weapons, there were musket lead balls and a limestone cannon which could be used for bombards.

Gun flints and case-shots remain from military actions of the 18th century Russian-Turkish wars, during which Russia struggled to capture the Northern Black Sea.