Having seen one of the earliest specimens of Vladimir-Suzdalian architecture let us now proceed to the last building belonging to this school - the Cathedral of St. George in Yuryev-Polskoi.

The best way to get to Yuryev-Polskoi is along the old Yuryev highway from Vladimir. The road passes through a part of the outskirts of Vladimir often missed by visi­tors to the town. As the bus runs down a deep, old gully known as Yerofeyev Hill (Yerofeevsky Spusk) we can see remains of the earth ramparts that surrounded Vla­dimir Monomach's town of 1108 on the right-hand side. The Copper Gates of the fortress built in 1158-1164 used to stand below by the River Lybed.

When the town limits are behind us we find ourselves in a beautiful broad expanse of fields with dark patches of forest here and there. The road runs north-west undu­lating gently like the road to Suzdal. About two miles from the town on the right-hand side we can see the Church of the Annunciation, all that remains of the fif­teenth-century Snovitsky monastery, near the village of Snovitsy on the high bank of the River Sodyshka. Even in this abandoned, solitary old church we can see how well Russian architects blended their buildings into the surrounding countryside. Legend has it that the church was built by Ivan the Terrible but it probably dates back to the seventeenth century. It belongs to a type that we have often met in Suzdal, a church raised on a high ground storey with a parvis on three sides. The parvis has survived on the west wall only, together with a covered stone porch and tent-shaped bell-tower. The monastery was poor and did not have the means to erect the other usual buildings.

The white outline of the church soon passes out of sight behind low hills scattered with copses. A little further and we are in the endless expanses of fertile arable land similar to the somewhat flatter "black earth" steppes in the Ukraine. Here we find some of the oldest villages in the area, which belonged to the Russian Metropolitans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and are thought to have been originally donated to the Cathedral of the Assumption in Vladimir by Andrei Bogolyubsky. They were the richest villages in the prince's lands. One of them, Stary Dvor (Old Homestead) lies on our route. The reason why these lands rapidly became the possessions of the princes and the church lies to a large extent in the fact that Yuri Dolgoruky built a new royal township here in 1152. To distinguish it from the older town of Yuryev in the Dnieper Basin it was called Yuryev-Polskoi, meaning Yuri's town among the fields. The road from Vladimir to Yuryev-Polskoi is a long one, but eventually the town comes into sight. From a distance it looks like a large village lying in a hollow, unlike Suzdal whose attractive outlines were immediately apparent. Only as one draws nearer is it possible to make out the white ensemble of the monas­tery and the heavy onion-shaped dome of the old Cathe­dral of St. George behind it.