Digging up a large wood-paneled basement, the archeologists found a veritable arsenal of steel helmets, fragments of chain armor, sword sheathes, metal-plated belts and steel-tipped arrows.
The biggest highlights of the more than four-century-old collection were a pair of gilded steel helmets with pointed tops only slightly touched by corrosion.
“You can find such helmets at the Armory Chamber, the Hermitage and the State History Museum,” Alexei Alexeyev, the head of the archeological team from the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Archeology, told RIA Novosti news agency.
“This find offers us better insight into how medieval Russian nobility prepared for military campaigns, with each having a private arsenal in the basement. Never before have we 'seen' the everyday life of a Russian nobleman who was the mainstay of the Russian army during golden age of the medieval Moscow state,” Alexeyev said.
