Veliky Novgorod

About the tour

Novgorod is eight and a half centuries older than St Petersburg. The chronicles date it from 859; in 862, by tradition, Rurik took up his rule here; and from 1136 to 1478 the city lived as a veche republic — with elected government, the expulsion of unwanted princes and a foreign policy of its own. It is the only Russian city with such a history: the Mongols never took Novgorod, so things survive here that survive nowhere else.

Novgorod was also the most literate city of early Rus. More than a thousand birch-bark letters have been found in its cultural layer: household accounts, love letters, and the copybook exercises of a boy called Onfim, who drew horsemen instead of letters. Everyone wrote — merchants, women, children.

Novgorod is 145 kilometres from St Petersburg, about two and a half hours by road. The city’s monuments are on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

What you will see

• The Novgorod kremlin (the Detinets) — a fortress whose history runs from 1044: towers, walls, the belfry and the view over the Volkhov.

• The St Sophia Cathedral — founded by Yaroslav the Wise and built between 1045 and 1050. The oldest surviving church on Russian territory: five domes, 38 metres high, austere Novgorod masonry in place of Byzantine ornament. Inside are the Magdeburg Doors, bronze doors of Romanesque work from the mid-twelfth century, worked in relief. On the cross of the central dome sits a lead dove: legend says it settled there during Ivan the Terrible’s massacre of 1570 and was petrified with horror, and that the Mother of God promised the city would stand as long as the dove did not fly away.

• The Millennium of Russia monument — erected in 1862 at the centre of the kremlin: 129 figures, the whole history of the country from Rurik to Nicholas I on a single orb. Your guide will point out who was refused a place on it, and why.

• Yaroslav’s Court — the trading side across the Volkhov: the site of the veche assemblies and the Novgorod market, where several ancient churches raised by merchant guilds stand side by side.

• The St George (Yuriev) Monastery — one of the oldest in Russia, founded in the 1030s. The St George Cathedral of 1119 stands on the bank of the Volkhov close to Lake Ilmen.

• Vitoslavlitsy — the open-air museum of wooden architecture beside the monastery, founded in 1964. Around seventy structures: seven wooden churches, chapels, peasant houses fully furnished, mills, a smithy, granaries. The oldest is the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin of 1539 from the village of Peredki, assembled without a single nail.

Why go with a guide

Novgorod is not about handsome views but about what lies behind them: how the veche worked and why the republic lost to Moscow, why captured German doors hang on a cathedral, what townspeople wrote to each other on birch bark, and how archaeologists learned to date finds to within a decade from the layers of soil.

Without that, the trip becomes an inspection of white churches that start to look alike by the third one. With a guide, each becomes part of a history eight hundred years older than anything you have seen in St Petersburg.

The tour is private: your own guide and car for the whole day, with collection from your hotel or apartment. Tickets to the kremlin, the St Sophia Cathedral, the St George Monastery and Vitoslavlitsy are part of the programme.