Город Владимир Путешествие по древним городам Владимирской земли Старый Владимир Old Russian Towns Памятники архитектуры Музеи Музеи, экспозиции

Город Суздаль История Суздаля Герб суздаля Архитектура Суздаля Музеи Суздаля

Досуг и развлечения Где поесть во Владимире Где поспать во Владимире Что можно посмотреть во Владимире Где поесть в Суздале Где поспать в Суздале Что можно посмотреть в Суздале

The old town of Vladimir was situated in extremely picturesque surroundings on the left bank of the River Klyazma. It stood on a high piece of ground intersected by deep gullies, bordered by the Klyazma on the south and the valley of the small River Lybed on the north (which has since been covered over to form part of the town's water supply system). The town was in the shape of an elongated triangle spread out along the banks of the Klyazma with its most acute angle pointing east . On the other side of the Klyazma stretched water-meadows fringed with a dark belt of hazy forest receding into the far distance. To the north and east of the town across the valleys of the Lybed and Irpen the land began to rise again up to the old villages of Dobroye and Krasnoye, which formerly stood apart from Vladimir with their beautifully situated churches that could be seen for miles around. Today they have practically become part of the town itself. In olden days the town was bordered on the west by vast stretches of ancient pine forest.

The first settlements to appear on this spot date back to the dim and distant past. Archaeological excavations have revealed traces of Finno-Ugrian settlements dating back to the first century A.D. not far from the cathedral on the elevated southwest point of the hill where the old town grew up. Later, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the first Slavic settlers from the Smolensk Krivichi tribe and the Slovenes of the Novgorod area began to appear. This high promontory raising forty to fifty meters above the Klyazma attracted early settlers because of its impregnability, providing a natural means of defense which was most important at a time when primitive tribal society was disintegrating and being replaced by a feudal society.

At that time the Klyazma was a large, important river wending its way in loops and curves across a wide belt of water-meadows near Vladimir to join the broad river Oka which linked the lands between the Oka and Klyazma with the ancient trading waterway of Eastern Europe - the Volga. It is not surprising that the gates of Vladimir leading to the Klyazma were called the Volga Gates. Situated on the remote borders of the Kievan state, the Zalessky region (which means "beyond the forests") with its ancient towns of Rostov and Suzdal was generously endowed with natural resources. Its forests provided pelts, its river and lakes were teeming with fish, the fertile water-meadows provided excellent pastures, and last, but by no means least, there were the rich open plains to the northwest of the Klyazma, which were ideal for agriculture.

It was only natural that this fertile, densely populated area on the northeast border of the Kievan state should soon attract the attention of the Kiev princes. In the eleventh century it came under the rule of Prince Vsevo-lod I and his descendants, and by ,the end of the century a bitter internecine feud had broken out for possession of the northeastern lands. The feudal struggles that ensued showed the vital strategic importance of the elevated ridge of ground along the Klyazma which faced the hostile principalities of Ryazan and Murom and protected Suzdal from the southwest. This was the decisive factor which caused the peaceful settlement of traders and craftsmen on the high promontory above the Klyazma to be transformed into a mighty fortress erected by Vsevo-lod's son, Vladimir Monomach, in the year 1108.

The shape of the fortress was dictated by the lie of the land. It was bounded to the south by the steep banks of the Klyazma, to the north by the Lybed valley, and to the east and west by the steep gullies in the plateau. At their far ends they were joined by ditches which thus cut the town off from the rest of the plateau. At these points there must have been towers and gates through which the road from Kiev in the south crossed the town on its way to the heart of the principality, Suzdal. Vladimir's builders constructed huge earth ramparts crowned with wooden walls all the way round the fortress. Traces of these ancient ramparts can still be seen in Proletarskaya Street (the northeast corner of the old town) and Komsomolskaya Street (northwest corner). Originally they covered a perimeter of 2.5 kilometres.

Inside the town walls, probably on the highest point overlooking the Klyazma, Monomach built the first stone church, the Church of Our Saviour. The new town was called Vladimir in honour of its founder, and this asymmetrical quadrangular fortress became the heart of the future capital of northeast Russia.

Vladimir's heir, Prince Yuri Dolgoruky, was too occupied with the struggle for the throne of Kiev to pay much attention to his northern possessions. It was not until a short time before his death that, evidently realising the futility of this struggle, he began to build a series of new fortress towns in the northeast, including the fortress of Moscow. A new royal palace was erected in Vladimir with a church made of white stone (1157) and dedicated to Saint George, the prince's patron saint. The palace stood on a high point of the town hill overlooking the southern slopes, to the west of Monomach's fortress. By the middle of the twelfth century the town appears to have spread eastwards as well along the road to Suzdal. New settlers arrived from the towns of the Dnieper basin and Kiev itself, riven by internecine feuds. This explains why many of the rivers around Vladimir were named after rivers near Kiev - the Lybed, Irpen and Pochaina. Right up to the last century in this region there was Knyazhy Lug (Prince's Meadow) and Yarilova Dolina (Yarilo Valley, named after the pagan Slavonic sun god).

The rapid growth of the town, its large population, rich natural resources and strategic importance led to it being made the capital of the Vladimir principality. Yuri Dolgoruky's son. Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky, decided to transfer his residence from the south to Vladimir - a town of craftsmen and traders (mizinyi lyudi or "little people"). These ordinary people gave tremendous support to the Vladimir princes in their struggle against the rich boyars for control of the principality and helped them to increase the political importance of the Vladimir lands in their efforts to save the country from being ruined by feudal warfare. A great deal of splendid building was carried out between 1158-1165. Earth ramparts were erected round the town's new unfortified sections which had grown up to the east and west of Monomach's fortress now referred to as the Middle Town. As in the time of Monomach, the new fortifications were bounded to the west by the gullies leading to the Klyazma and Lybed. The western part of the town had four turreted gates: the Volga Gates at the foot of the Middle Town leading to the jetty on the Klyazma, the wooden Irina (Irininskiye Vorota) and Copper (Medniye Vorota) gates on the slopes of the gullies leading to the Lybed, and the Golden Gates (Zolotiye Vorota) made of white stone through which the main road to the south ran.

The ends of the gullies were joined at the Golden Gates by a deep ditch with a bridge across it. Traces of the western ramparts can still be found to the south of the Golden Gates at Kozlov Val. Andrei had a new royal palace and white stone Church of Our Saviour (1164) erected by the Golden Gates next to Yuri Dolgoruky's palace. The whole western part of the town was clearly set aside for the prince and the rich boyars. The eastern section, a triangular wedge whose long sides sloped down from the promontory, formed the posad where the tradesmen and artisans lived. It was also surrounded by earth ramparts with wooden walls and at its easternmost tip the Silver Gates (Serebryaniye Vorota) were built of white stone by a bridge across the Lybed from whence the road ran on to the royal palace at Bogolyubovo and Suzdal. Traces of the so-called Conception Ramparts (Zachatyevsky Val) can be found behind the houses on the north side of Frunze Street. Chronicles refer to the Middle Town as Cave Town (Pecherny Gorod). The western part is called the New Town (Novy Gorod), and the eastern quarter, whose fortifications began to crumble and collapse within a few centuries, is known as the Decayed Town (Vetchany Gorod). The town's ramparts now covered a total perimeter of 7 kilometres which was more than those of Kiev (4 kilometres) and Novgorod (6 kilometres).

The large Cathedral of the Assumption (Uspensky Sobor) (1158-1160) was built on the elevated southwestern corner of the Middle Town. Together with the white stone churches of St. George and Our Saviour, which were also situated high up on the southern edge of the town, the Cathedral of the Assumption formed part of Vladimir's strikingly beautiful southern facade. Its longitudinal axis was decorated with the towers of the Golden Gates, the Trading Gates (Torgoviye Vorota) in the west wall of the Middle Town, the Ivan Gates (Ivanovskiye Vorota) in the east wall of the Middle Town, and the Silver Gates at the easternmost tip of the town.

The next stage in the architectural history of the town came at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries. The strengthening of the Grand Prince's power under Vsevolod III and the increasing political awareness of the citizens of Vladimir resulted in a number of serious riots and uprisings. The prince decided to move his residence to the Middle Town. A sumptuous stone palace with the Cathedral of St. Dmitri (1194-1197) was erected by the south wall next to the episcopal residence. This section of the Middle Town, which was known as the Detinets (an archaic Russian word meaning inner fortress, or citadel of the reigning prince), was surrounded by stone walls with fortified gates (1194-1196) to separate the residences of the prince and bishop from the hustle and bustle of the town. The Cathedral of the Assumption had been badly damaged in the fire of 1185 and Vsevolod had new walls erected round the old building (1185-1189). As a result of this the Cathedral now had five aisles instead of the former three and this increase in size emphasised, as it were, the importance of the citadel as the architectural centre of the town. The Monastery of the Nativity (Rozhdestvensky Monastyr) was built in the southeast corner of the Middle Town with a cathedral of white stone (1192-1195). This new ensemble formed a kind of second inner citadel. The rowdy Vladimir market was moved to the north part of the Middle Town (behind the Street of the Third International) facing the menacing fortified walls of the citadel. In 1218 Vsevolod's successor, Prince Konstantin, erected the small Church of the Exaltation of the Cross (Vozdvizheniye) on this spot. Princess Maria, the wife of Vsevolod III, founded the Convent of the Assumption (Uspensky Monastyr also known as the Knyaginin Monastyr or Princess Convent) with a cathedral made of brick (1200-1201) which was erected in the northwest corner of the New Town.

The foregoing is a brief account of how the old town of Vladimir grew up with its many splendid buildings. It should be emphasised that the most important structures, i. e., the stone buildings, were very few in number. The vast majority of the churches were made of wood. We know, for example, that in the twelfth century a wooden Church of St. Nicholas stood on the slopes leading down to the river outside the Golden Gates, and that further west on a high piece of ground there were the wooden buildings of the Monastery of the Ascension (Voznesensky Monastyr). By this time dwellings had started to appear outside the walls of the New Town. It is possible that the old street name Gonchari (Potters) dates back to this period. We learn from the chronicles that 32 churches were burnt down in Vladimir during the great fire of 1185. The rich dwellings of the merchants and boyars and the houses of the ordinary people were all built of wood.
We can now get a general picture of the town's layout and buildings in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It took the form of a triangle consisting of three sections which had grown up at different stages and bounded on two sides by the Klyazma and Lybed (111. 1). The central street ran from one end of the town to the other (along what is now Moskovskaya St., Third International St. and Frunze St.) and was intersected by four turreted gates. Entering the town through the Golden Gates the traveller would see the royal palaces with the Church of Our Saviour and the Church of St. George on the right. On the left in the distance was the ensemble of the Princess Convent. These impressive buildings stood out against the broad panorama of the water-meadows and distant forests beyond the Klyazma and the gentle wooded slopes to the north. Straight ahead of the traveller rose the earth ramparts and walls of the Middle Town and the wooden tower of the Trading Gates. Beyond the walls in the southern corner he could see the huge white building of the Cathedral of the Assumption with its five domes.
1   Plan oЈ Vladimir. 12th-13th centuries

I - Monomach's town ("Cave Town" or "Middle Town") 1108;

II - "Decayed Town", fortifications 1158-1164; III- "New Town", fortifications 1158-1164; IV-citadel 1194-1196;

1. Church of Our Saviour

2. Church of St. George

3. Cathedral of the Assumption

4. Golden Gates

5. Irina Gates

6. Copper Gates

7. Silver Gates

8. Volga Gates

9 Cathedral of St. Dmitri

10. Monastery of the Ascension

11. Monastery of the Nativity

12. Princess Convent

13. Trading Gates

14. Ivan Gates

15. Fortress Gates

16. Church of the Exaltation of the Cross in the Market Place

Passing through the Trading Gates into the Middle Town the traveller would find himself in the centre of the capital. On the right behind the white walls of the citadel he could see the shining golden domes of the Cathedral of the Assumption and the turrets of the episcopal residence, the Cathedral of St. Dmitri and Vsevo-lod's palace, with the Cathedral of the Monastery of the Nativity in the distance. On the left was the market square and the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross against a background of meadows stretching as far as the eye could see. In front of him were the eastern walls of the Middle Town with the Ivan Gates.

These gates led into the town's trading and artisan quarter (posad), where the houses and churches were all built of wood. At this point the triangle tapered off and the town looked more like a large village with its main street lined with buildings. This impression would have been reinforced by the open countryside which lay beyond the town walls to the south and east. The main street finally passed through the Silver Gates leaving the town and joining the road to Dobroye, Bogolyubovo and Suzdal.

We do not know the exact layout of the other streets, but bearing in mind that the Decayed Town was quite narrow it is reasonable to assume that they were similar to the short narrow alleys leading off the main street today. In the Middle Town a large area was taken up by the market and it is most likely that the streets from the northeast part of the town converged on this spot. In the New Town there appears to have been a street leading from the Copper Gates by the Lybed along the ramparts to the Volga Gates on the Klyazma. It is possible that there was also a street linking the Trading and Irina Gates.

It was not only inside the walls that one saw a succession of splendid views of the town and its buildings. Its builders attached possibly even more importance to the appearance of its outer "facades" which were obviously planned to impress travellers approaching the town from different directions. They made skilful use of the town's hilly relief to create an architectural ensemble which dominated the surrounding countryside. From the Yuryev-Polskoi road and the open fields that rose gently to the northwest one had an excellent view of the whole town somewhat elevated. From the hills down which the Suzdal road approached Vladimir from the east you could see the town climbing gently upwards. Close behind the Silver Gates came the wooden houses of the townspeople interspersed with tall wooden churches. Rising behind them were the walls of the Middle Town with the Ivan Gates and towers, and further still on the left were the gleaming cupolas of the cathedrals in the Monastery of the Nativity and the citadel.

But without a doubt the most impressive view of the town was from the south, where it faced onto the Klyazma and the vast expanse of water-meadows and forest through which the road to Murom ran. From here one saw the town stretched out in all its splendour, similar to Kiev on the Dnieper. On a hill to the west there were the wooden buildings of the Monastery of the Ascension and the Church of St. Nicholas. At the southern corner of the New Town the ramparts began to descend down to the Volga Gates only to rise again sharply up to the corner of the Middle Town. Behind the walls in a semi-circular hollow on the hillside were a mass of small houses and gardens, and above them on the edge of the high plateau stood the royal palaces with the Church of Our Saviour and the Church of St. George, and the steep gabled roofs of the merchants' and boyars' dwellings. The focal point of the whole panorama was the Cathedral of the Assumption standing on the corner of the Middle Town with its domes glittering proudly. On a line with it were the smaller cathedrals of St. Dmitri and the Nativity spaced more or less evenly apart. Standing right on the edge of the plateau they created the illusion that the whole of the town was full of similar buildings of white stone. From its highest point, the Cathedral of the Assumption, the outline of the town began to descend slowly and gently. The skyline of the lowest part, the Decayed Town with its tall wooden churches and the tent-shaped spires of the fortified towers, was jagged and more sharply defined. The view of the town from the south was most magical and impressive in the early morning at sunrise when the water-meadows and the high ground on which the town was situated were enveloped in a swirling blanket of white mist and the golden domes of the stone cathedrals flamed in the early rays of the sun like something out of a fairy tale. There can be no doubt that the magnificent views which the town presents from both inside and outside are not simply accidental. They were the result of very careful planning by its architects. The desire to set buildings off to their best advantage, which was typical of all the architecture belonging to the time of Andrei Bogolyubsky and Vsevolod III as we shall see later, is also a prominent feature of their capital, Vladimir.

The great flowering of culture that took place in the Vladimir domains was a result of the progressive rule of the "Vladimir autocrats" who allied with the townspeople and minor nobility to gain control of the Russian lands and prevent the country from being weakened and disunited by the warring feudal princes. This policy was also in the interests of the peasants who were suffering badly from the havoc wrought by the bitter internecine struggles. It was accompanied by a great flowering of architecture and the arts, as well as a spate of literary activity. Chronicles were kept in the town of Vladimir. Andrei Bogolyubsky's chronicler and spiritual advisor, Mikula, frequently praised the staunchness and patriotism of the citizens of Vladimir in the struggle to protect their interests. There was a great deal of writing by Vladimir priests and monks intended to demonstrate the ecclesiastical importance of the Vladimir lands. They composed lays about the various "miracles" performed by the icon of the Virgin of Vladimir and wrote many works in praise of Bishop Leontius who was killed in the eleventh century during an uprising by the townspeople of Rostov and subsequently became the "martyr" of the north. They introduced new prayers and ritual for the Vladimir church festival of the Intercession of Our Lady. Finally, there was Mikula's beautifully written, moving account of the murder of Andrei Bogolyubsky by the boyars. All these works show a high level of literary achievement stemming from Kievan folklore traditions. They are all dominated by a single political idea, namely, the right of Vladimir to rule the whole of Russia and the need for a united state. The forces of feudal disintegration gained the upper hand, however, and after the death of Vsevo-lod III in 1212 the unity of his lands was broken. This left the country weakened and divided on the eve of the Mongol invasion.

The Mongols reached Vladimir in 1238. After a stubborn siege the town eventually fell to the invaders who looted and set fire to it. Even after this great disaster, however, the town continued to be regarded by the people of the time as the centre of northeast Russia and the repository of its political and cultural traditions. Vladimir became the residence of the Metropolitan of the Russian Church at the end of the thirteenth century. The Grand Duchy of Vladimir was fiercely contested by the rulers of Moscow and Tver, and coronations to the Russian throne continued to take place under the tall arches of the Cathedral of the Assumption. Both Moscow and Tver modelled their architecture on that of Vladimir. Prince Dmitri Donskoi put the Cathedral of St. Dmitri under his patronage, and in 1380 on the eve of the battle of Kulikovo the famous twelfth-century icon of St. Demetrius of Salonica (Dmitri Solunsky) was taken from the Cathedral to Moscow. In 1395 Vladimir's most treasured relic, the icon of the Virgin of Vladimir, was removed to the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Moscow Kremlin. Moscow not only borrowed from Vladimir's historic traditions, but also acquired many of the twelfth-century works of art made in Vladimir, In 1408 after a devastating raid on the town by the Mongols when the Cathedral of the Assumption was damaged by fire. Prince Vassili I sent the great Russian painter Andrei Rublev to restore its murals. Two years later the town was again sacked by the Mongols.

In 1469 a talented Russian architect, Vassili Yermolin, restored the Golden Gates and the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross on the Market Place, which had both been severely damaged and fallen into a dilapidated state. The town's fortifications were not restored on their former scale. Only the wooden walls of the Middle Town were rebuilt in 1486, and again in 1491 and 1536. The ramparts of the west and east sections of the town gradually fell into a state of disrepair until they eventually disappeared altogether. At the end of the fifteenth century the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Princess Convent was rebuilt by architects from Moscow.

From then onwards Vladimir ceased to be the capital of the northeast lands and simply became one of the towns in the Muscovite state, a town with great memories and sacred relics. It developed extremely slowly. In 1489 settlers from Novgorod formed a sloboda* on the opposite bank of the Lybed, known as the Varvarka Sloboda. Two other settlements appeared in the same area in the middle of the sixteenth century, the Strelets-kaya Sloboda and Pushkarskaya Sloboda, which eventually combined to form the one Streletskaya Sloboda. Another two appeared in the seventeenth century -Upper and Lower Borovki. Legend has it that the latter was founded by the early Novgorod settlers and the large brick house belonging to the Babushkin merchant family was first built in the sixteenth century.

The earliest available figures of the town's population show it to have been very small. In 1584, for example, there were only twenty homesteads in the Streletskaya and Pushkarskaya settlements, and in 1592* Sloboda: settlement Russia inhabitants were temporarily exempt from taxes and other duties.

2. Plan of Vladimir. 1715 (Leningrad, Library of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences)

only one hundred inhabitants. It was at this time that the Yamskaya (Coachmen's) Sloboda grew up just outside the Golden Gates, with its wooden Church of the Holy Virgin of Kazan. Behind it stretched Yamskoi Bor (pine forest). In 1668 the town possessed only 990 inhabitants and 400 houses; the craftsmen and artisans lived in the eastern part and the traders in the western quarter where, in 1684, there was a Traders' Mart (Gostiny Dvor) with 392 small stalls on the market place, and the Church of St. Paraskeva Pyatnitsa, the patron saint of trade.

The practice of building in stone was revived again in the seventeenth century. Although there can be no comparison with the golden age of Vladimir architecture, the builders of this period took great pains to see that their new buildings blended in with the old ones. In 1649, for example, Vladimir merchants erected the elegant Church of Our Lady in the posad which fitted in beautifully with the town's southern aspect. The huge tent-shaped bell-tower built over the stone gates of the citadel emphasised the ancient architectural centre of the town by its high vertical lines. A similar, but more elegant bell-tower was built in the Monastery of the Nativity, together with the Holy Gates (Svyatiye Vorota) which had murals on the walls of the entrance arch. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the monastery's old wooden walls were replaced by stone ones, forming a kind of ornamental "kremlin", or fortress, on the southeast side of the Middle Town. The small Church of St. Nicholas and a square-shaped bell-tower were built in the courtyard of the old royal palace near the Church of Our Saviour. This process of enhancing the town's southern aspect was continued by eighteenth-century builders who replaced the old wooden churches with stone ones, such as the Church of St. Nicholas at the Galleys (1735) at the foot of Kozlov Val, and the Church of the Ascension (1724).

The ingenuous plan of Vladimir drawn by an icon painter in 1715 gives some idea of the layout and condition of the town at that time. The kremlin, with its wooden walls and towers erected between 1491 and 1536 on the ancient earth ramparts of the Middle Town, formed the centre of the town. It is significant that eight out of the fourteen towers were situated along the southern wall, not because they were necessary from a military point of view, but due to the concern of the builders for the town's southern aspect. The Patriarch's Gardens were also here on the southern slopes of the hill. The area north of the Cathedral consisted of a considerable number of fortified buildings and residences, including the particularly impressive residence of the military governor (voyevoda). To the north of the main street (Bol-shaya Ulitsa) there was a densely populated area intersected by a network of twisting alleys. The pond by the Tainitsky Tower in the north of the kremlin, which was used to store water in case of siege, is still there. Near the western Trading Gates there was a prison surrounded by a stockade of sharp stakes.

The western section of the town was the trading quarter; here the market square with its rows of stalls and workshops adjoined the north side of the main street which was the only street in the town to be paved with planks of oak. The other streets were simply like muddy country roads. The buildings outside the Golden Gates looked just like a village, and the houses on the opposite bank of the Lybed and in the eastern part of the town had also grown up in a similar higgledy-piggledy fashion. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the town's population was a mere 1,840.

Its old buildings suffered considerably in the eighteenth century: the wooden walls of the kremlin were knocked down and the earth ramparts began to collapse; the stone churches of Our Saviour and St. George, which had been damaged in the fire of 1778, were demolished and replaced by new ones; and the upper section of the Golden Gates was rebuilt. The Vladimir namestnichestvo was set up in 1778, an administrative unit which later became the Vladimir gubernia in 1796 with the town of Vladimir as its centre. Under Catherine the Great many of the old Russian towns were re-designed on a more symmetrical basis. The new plans for Vladimir, however, did not alter the town's original layout as much as might have been feared. For example, the remains of the twelfth-century ramparts were preserved as well as the old main street. A network of new quarters were built around the latter. Moreover, the local architects managed to correct the worst errors contained in the plans which had been drawn up by government officials in St. Petersburg. The proposal to erect two buildings for the Gostiny Dvor which would have obscured the view of the Cathedrals of the Assumption and St. Dmitri from the main street was never put into effect. Unfortunately, however, the massive Provincial Administration building was erected between the two cathedrals in 1785, spoiling the ancient beauty of the town's southern aspect with its barrack-like appearance.

A new centre for the provincial capital grew up in the old town centre. On the east side was the governor's residence built in 1808. On the north side there were two buildings in Russian classical style — the Noblemen's Club (Dvoryanskoye Sobraniye) built on the corner in 1826, and the adjacent building, a boys' grammar school and boarding school (1840) which had previously been the house of the merchant Petrovsky. The highest focal point of the town was the new cathedral bell-tower built in 1810 in place of the original tent-shaped one which had been struck by lightning. On the north side of the main street a large area was taken up by an arcade of trading booths (1787-1790) separating it from the market place, part of which has survived to this day. Further on in the direction of the Golden Gates was the portico of the Church of St. Nicholas at the Golden Gates (1796 - no longer extant) which seemed to reflect the porticos of the buildings on the central square. Finally, round corner bastions were added to the Golden Gates.

The subsequent industrial development of Russia had little effect on Vladimir which remained a small town of
petty government officials and the lower middle class. The town fathers showed little concern for preserving what remained of their beautiful old town. One of them, a merchant by the name of Nikitin, produced a barbaric plan for turning the Golden Gates into a water-tower. Luckily no one dared to go this far, but one of the town's most attractive spots, Kozlov Val, was spoiled by the addition of a new tower. The town's main street was lined with large apartment houses containing trading premises, whose back yards opened out onto the picturesque southern slopes of the town, which were dotted with small houses belonging to the middle class. In 1861 the railway from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod appeared at the foot of the southern slopes ruining the beautiful view once and for all.

Today the beautiful old buildings of Vladimir and its environs are safely in the hands of the state. Even in the difficult years of the civil war, money and manpower were set aside for looking after them. The cleaning of the frescoes in the Cathedral of the Assumption, begun in 1918, was one of the first restoration projects to be undertaken after the revolution. Since then a great deal of important restoration work and research has been carried out on these fine specimens of early Russian architecture so dear to the hearts of all Soviet people.

Имя или Ник:    Email:

Введите число, указанное на картинке: