One of the things that I love about journalism is that I am always learning new things. And yesterday morning, I got an especially big dose of learning.

Like most people, I have always thought of the word "Kremlin" in the singular, with a capital K. I believed that it referred solely to the giant walled complex at the center of Moscow, and I used "Kremlin" as being synonymous with "government" since the Moscow site is where Russia's president and legislators do their work.

But yesterday, while researching the post on Astrakhan, I landed on photos of stunning walled compound there that is also called a kremlin. I learned that, in Russian, that word means "fortress" or "citadel", and that Russia has many of them.

I'm sort of ashamed that I didn't know this before. I love walled cities--places like Avila, Spain and York, England and medieval gems like Les Baux de Provence in France and Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany. But the medieval times left a trail of fortified cities in Russia too. Cities like Velikiy Novgorod in Novgorod Oblast; Kazan, in the Republic of Tatarstan; Nizhny Novgorod, a so-called Golden Ring city that withstood two Tatar assaults, as well as Pskov and Smolensk.

What do you find in a kremlin? Walls, to be sure, but also a leader's fortress, a tower and at least one house of worship. That, in most cases, is a Russian Orthodox Church (there are several gems in Moscow's Kremlin), but the Kazan kremlin includes a mosque. Sometimes, the walled compounds that surrounded monasteries are called kremlins--like the Solovetsky Monastery in Archangelsk Oblast--but these didn't include a ruler's residence. The tower would have been used for both scanning the surrounding countryside for potential invaders and sounding an alarm to call all residents back within the gates.

Maybe you've been lucky enough to visit some of these other kremlins in your adoption journeys and, if so, I hope you'll give us your impressions. I've only been to Moscow's Kremlin; Sakhalin and Vladivostok, my two adoption destinations, were settled well after the Middle Ages and its architecture had passed. But seeing all the pictures of these other kremlins has got me thinking of a wall city tour of Russia someday, too.

Image, credit: Moscow's kremlin, by olpol