Velikiy Novgorod

(St Sophia cathedral)

Novgorod is a major tourist centre of Russia. It was one of the city-states of Kievan Rus, and it was the only one to stay free when the Mongols conquered Asia in the 13th century. During the Golden Horde's occupation ("the Tatar yoke" in Russian) Moscow became powerful as a Mongol client, and after the occupation ended it became the capital of the new Russian state.

The centre of Novgorod is its Kremlin, a medieval fortress. Today it contains a dozen small museums, the St Sophia cathedral, and the Millenium of Russia monument I described in the Russian history entry. We hired a local tour guide for a 20 minute walking tour (his first time in English). Across the Volkhov river is the Market Side, which traditionally had a giant market. That area is a park now. There are about a dozen attractive churches which were built by rich merchants.

Here is St Sophia cathedral. It is the oldest church in Russia and the first to use the Russian Orthodox onion dome. It was first built in wood in the 12th century, then rebuilt in stone in the 15th century to withstand the Swedish army's artillery. The feeling of mass inside is incredible; it was 10 C cooler inside than out. As you can see, the outside walls are featureless, but inside there are medieval ikons and a beautiful fresco of biblical scenes. It is a working church, with pious visitors and daily services, and I didn't feel it was appropriate to take pictures.
During the Soviet Union, St Sophia was used as a museum of atheism.
At one point, the Russian empire plundered this 12th-century German door and put it on St Sophia. Click on it to see the detail work:

Novgorod had a simple but useful tourist info centre called "red izba" (traditional peasant cottage). They spoke some English there.

We stayed at the Novgorod Intourist Hotel (!). For those who don't know it, Intourist was the Soviet tourism agency, with notoriously uncomfortable accommodations and rude staff. Since 1991, it's had to compete on an equal footing with other hospitality companies, so it's on par with other hotels.
I visited a small museum of local artists. It was mostly amateurish portraits of aristocrats, but several pieces were appealing or poignant. My favorite one showed a small Little Red Riding Hood (Красная Кепочка) in an ominous and tangled forest.

The Novgorod Museum of Art and History houses the oldest ikons in the country. Alas, it was closed when we went there.

At one point, we walked about an hour out of town, to an "open-air museum of peasant architecture." It had many examples of the "wooden lace" churches and houses which I showed in the Rural Russia entry.

Here is a view of the countryside with the city in the background.

We caught the train to Moscow around 10pm and arrived about 6am. It is set up to be an overnight from St Petersburg. We were in second class (купе), so we had a closed cabin with 2 others. We had the two top bunks, which requires a certain gymnastic skill. At first, the train was oppressively hot, but once we left the station the ventilation and air conditioning turned on. I found it comfortable enough for an overnight trip.