First Chechen War MOC

 The decade of the 90s was a tricky one for Russia. The USSR fell in 1991 and then Russia inherited the crisis of the Soviet state. A moment like this feels like the perfect moment to declare your independence if you rule a region and that is your goal. So the Chechens did it. To understand why Chechenya wanted its independence we must aknowledge the many differences existing between this region and the Russian state. First of all the Chechens weren't Russians. It wasn't their ethnicity either it was their culture. They didn't even share a religion since most of the Chechens are Sunni muslims and Russians are mainly Christian Ortodox. Russia was basically seen as an invasor. Opposite to this view we have the Russian government who saw the region as an important asset to their geopolitics. It was possible that if other regions saw they could declare their independence as Chechenya did then they would declare it too and that was a threat the Russian government with Boris Yeltsin at the head wouldn't tolerate. On December 1994 the war started and around 20 months later the war finished with Russia as the loser of a war that they thought would only take days. The same story repeats over and over again huh?

Here you can see the build itself. It took me around 2 months. It has around 5 floors. The bottom ones belog to a grocery store and the upper ones are residential ones. This time there isn't a clear inspiration for the building since I couldn't find many info on the building desings of the 90s Chechenya. Anyway I hope it looks kinda similar to what the buildings looked like back then. The basement has a light I put inside the closed part (in the space behind the black bricks). This MOC isn't the one I enjoyed the most because as it grew tall I got more and more lost on how to finish the building. There was space to recreate more things (more rooms or a sewer tunnel) but I just couldn't figure out what I wanted for this build to look like when finished. Anyway I tested some new stuff that will be helpful in the future like the gap made of plates in the middle of the wall right over the car and the door of the store. It may look a bit off in this build but I will make it better in future builds. I saw people at Instagram doing it and I think it can look really good. Minifigs have also been a problem. I'm happy with how the Russian ones look even their body is from random soldiers bought at AliExpress and it looks similar to 90s Russian uniforms but it isn't accurate if you compare to their real counterparts. With the Chechen fighters I had more trouble. I couldn't get an accurate idea of how they really looked like in real life so I improvised inspired by some clips and pictures I found about the first and second of the wars happened in Chechenya in that era. The car was one of my main motivations for the build and it looks bad compared to the idea I had. It's supposed to be a Lada Niva. I need to work more on making cars. 

I will give this topic another try in the future. This conflict happened 30 years ago so I hope if somehow someone related to the war and the consequences it had sees this post or the build somewhere I really hope they understand one of the reasons for me to build and share stuff like that is to pay tribute to the many people that sadly uses to die and get injured in the wars and that we must not forget them otherwise feels like they died for nothing. Now all the pictures I took and video I uploaded to YouTube. 

Find the YouTube video here: 

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post!

My custom Byzantine minifigures

Thanks to the suggestions you often give me on YouTube and so I discovered the Byzantine products made by Loongbrick and decided to buy some accessories to build minifigures of the Eastern Roman Empire.

As you may know I love the Roman Empire era and I consider the Eastern Roman Empire to be the true continuation of the Roman state. It has a rich story and the possibilities to create MOCs and other content about it are very extensive. Did you know that even though it is often treated as something separate its people saw themselves as Romans and some continued to do so until the 19th century?

For nearly a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 this empire preserved Roman law, administration, and classical knowledge while fighting enemies ranging from the northern warriors of the Rus to the many Islamic empires that rose in the Middle East.

The possibilities when you create combos using different accessories and colors for the minifig bodies is very extensive. It is really fun to create these combos and in the last weeks they added even more Byzantine products so now there are even more options to choose. The soldiers you see here represent heavy infantry and cavalry. The quality of the products is awesome. They are made of rigid resin with good hardness and certain toughness as they say in their store. It is true. The colors are applied manually they say too. Based on what I saw searching for information I would say these minifigs and accessories fit the period going from the year 1000 or 1100 to 1300 or even the end of the empire in the 1450s. I will use them to represent any period from 900 to the end of the empire in the year 1453. I would really recommend these accessories if you like them because I think these are some of my best minifigs. You can see clothes from Capes4Minifigs too because I wanted to test how they look mixed with the armor and I'm quite happy with the result. In the future I will test more and get more stuff from Capes4Minifigs to use with these minifigs. In the next pictures I show you the reference pictures to create these minifigs.

Source: https://warhistory.org/es/@msw/article/the-military-of-the-byzantines

Source: https://warhistory.org/es/@msw/article/the-military-of-the-byzantines

And now talking about the future and what I will do with them I'm planning on building a MOC about a watchtower in Greece. The story about the tower and the land around it is interesting and I want to create a video explaining it. In the long term I would love to build a section of the Theodosian walls during the siege of Constantinople. I think it could look amazing but I would need to create proper Ottoman soldiers and many more tan parts! What would you do or build with them? Do you like them? Let me know!

You can watch the Youtube video I posted about them here: 

Napoleonic Wars tent MOC

 Welcome back to Die Bricke Wochenschau. This week we take a look at my latest MOC. This one is a small one I built in like 5 hours (3 of them to build the tree) and I think it will be the first of some but we will see. I plan my next bigger MOC to be about the First Chechen War but in the meantime I want to build some smaller MOCs. This first one is inspired by a visit I made in September 2024 to Hostalrich castle where as every year Napoleonic Wars reenactors were there recreating different daily scenes of the Napoleonic era armies and the French ones had tents built as if they were resting. I will show you a picture of it too. One day I will build a MOC about the castle because the story it has is interesting and the desing is really cool. Since I saw it I wanted to recreate one of these tents in LEGO so shortly after I built some wedge plates to do the triangle shape they have when you look their front part. Because of different reasons it wasn't until now that I decided to build it and I wanted to test again building trees too. I wanted a tree to go next to it in a simple scene but I think it looks nice. In the scene a soldier and an official talk in front of the tent that lies next to a tree to partially cover it from the Sun.

For the first time ever I counted how many parts I used (I did it counting them while scrapping the MOC) and the total amount is 862. The tree you see has almost half of them. I'm really happy with how the whole MOC turned out. The tent looks really good I think and the tree too. It represents a tree that could be found at any Mediterranean country. As always I guess it can be improved and I will think of ways to do it. The technic for the tree is the best one I used so far. Even there are many kind of trees and plants in the world and you can't use the same technics for them all I think this is still the best tree I have built so far. It was the part I enjoyed the most building and I would love to build a MOC someday with some of them in a scene representing a forest or a Roman Villa for example. The trunk is made with plates on 4 sides holded by 1x1 bricks with a stud on one side. Next time the challenge will be to recreate some roots of the tree coming out of the floor! 

The scene that inspired the MOC. Yes I deleted 2 persons. (Hostalrich castle September 2024)

As always I hope you enjoyed this build guys. This time was smaller but I think it is enjoyable too.

Hadrian's Wall MOC

 First post of the year. Happy New Year! I'm proud to show you finally my finished project of the Hadrian's Wall milecastle. Milecastles were little fortlets for 20-30 soldiers inside the Hadrian's Wall. There was one each Roman mile (1480 meters). That's the reason of the name. After the expansion years of the emperor Trajan it came Hadrian with a defensive mindset and he reinforced the limes (frontiers) of the Roman empire. The idea he had for Britannia was to build the wall we are talking about. In 6 years most of it was already built. The wall itself was 117km long and went from Wallsend on the river Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west. It consisted of 80-84 milecastles like the one I built and 158 watch towers and 16 forts that had up to 1000 soldiers destined inside. It had a defensive purpose obviously but it was intended too to separate the northern tribes like the Picts or Caledonians who were problematic from the Roman province (Britannia). Once they were clearly separated it was easier to control the traffic of people livestock and goods between the north and south of the island. And if you can control it you can levy taxes. The construction of the wall began in the year 122 AD. 20 years later the emperor Antonine tried to establish a new wall 100 kilometers to the north (the Antonine Wall) but around 20 years later it was abandoned to never use it again. The Romans occupied Britannia until the early 400s and after they left the wall started it's decadence even some parts and forts remained used for some more decades (by native tribes I assume). Although many stones of the Hadrian's Wall were taken to build the sorrounding towns the ruins we have today are protected and let us understand very well how this defensive line was. Let's take a look at how was the wall organized. 

Source: https://brilliantmaps.com/hadrians-wall-map/

Here we can see the different parts of the defenses. The stone wall was just the main part but there were more. There was a road that went behind the wall and communicated all the forts and towers. In the scheme below these different defenses can be seen.

Source: https://learnodo-newtonic.com/hadrians-wall-facts/schematic-section-of-hadrians-wall

Source: https://www.despertaferro-ediciones.com/revistas/numero/el-muro-de-adriano-imperio-romano-adrian-goldsworthy/

In the previous picture we can see an inllustration of the milecastle in the right and a tower in the left. Between every milecastle there were 2 towers like that one.

Now we will talk about my LEGO build itself. First of all you will notice my fortlet doesn't have a tower like the illustrations and recreations you can find at internet. This was due to 2 reasons: I had the bricks but not enough tiles to keep it looking like the rest of the built so it would have looked weird and seem like I finished the build unmotivated in a rush. Second one and also important is that I didn't know how to build it with a smooth transition in the inside walls. The fortlet should have been 2 studs wider on each side to be able to build a tower without it looking like all is piled up and very tight. When I realized about it I had done so much section of the wall that I thought it just wasn't worth it to rebuild it all. I really enjoyed building this (ancient/medieval fortresses have something special) so maybe one day when I own more bricks I build a longer section of the wall and I build a milecastle again. As I mentioned I love ancient and medieval fortresses and castles so for some time I wanted to build something like that. Romans is what I love the most to study about (with Napoleonic Wars and the World War II and the Nazis) and the Roman frontiers is what I find more interesting I would say. From a lone fort in the middle of the desert in the Middle East to the wood watchtowers between forests in Germania. Back when information was scarce and there were many myths and beliefs it must have been terrifying to be a sentinel in the Hadrian's Wall during the cold winter knowing many of the natives living in front of you hate you. The daily live of the soldiers there is something I find fasninating. Even for many of them it was just boring I guess I find amazing how advanced in time the Romans were for many things. About the build itself I saw I need to improve in the curved corners because I want them to look more symmetrical. Walls should have been a brick taller so the roofs were taller too and the horse isn't taller than the stables he must live in. Other than that I'm very happy with the build. It may look empty of minifigs but the front part wasn't big enough to fit properly a horse carrying a wagon with natives wanting to cross the border to trade as I thought at first when planning the build. I have chosen late empire soldiers because they are my favorites. Typical early empire ones look really cool too and I could have used like 10 of them but for once I wanted my build in an era were Romans struggled to survive. The soldiers represent Limitanei troops who were soldiers destined to garrison the Roman frontiers and stop the enemy while bigger and better trained and equipped troops (Comitatenses) came to face the enemy.

The picture that inspired the build and my original plan:

Source: https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/fine-art-prints/Philip-Corke/1208858/Winshields-Milecastle,-Hadrian%27s-Wall,-Northumberland.html

These milecastles had barracks for the soldiers stables for the horses and ovens to cook. 20-30 soldiers lived inside and it is believed they were the garrison of the sorrounding towers. And I think that was all I wanted to write. If you want to know more about the building process I posted 5 previous posts about the process and if you want to know more about the minifigs check this one: https://diebrickewochenschau.blogspot.com/2025/12/week-4-building-hadrians-wall-in-lego.html I hope the new year brings great stuff for everyone reading this and I can't wait to show you more of my LEGO ideas and projects. At the end of this post after all the pictures you will find a YouTube video of the build as always. I would appreciate it so much if you take a look at it specially this time because I'm testing a new format using a character to introduce the build in first person and it took more hours than usual to edit the video and I want to know your opinion about the result. See you guys and thank you for reading!

Internal structure

I'm happy with how the corners look like. Was kinda challenging