Historic Monuments of Novgorod and Surroundings

Novgorod stood on the trade routes linking the Baltic and Scandinavia with Central Asia and Byzantium, and it first appears in records in the 9th century. Its aristocracy governed the city-republic through a popular assembly, the veche, and invited a prince from the Varangian Rurikid dynasty, whose line went on to rule the Russian lands for 700 years.

Under the Novgorod Republic of the 12th to 15th centuries, the archbishops made the city a leading centre of Russian art and culture. St Sophia was built in the mid-11th century, and the oldest Russian manuscripts were written here in the 11th century. Spared by the Mongol invasions, Novgorod kept building churches in the 14th century, and Theophanes the Greek painted the frescoes of the Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyina Street, built in 1374.

Moscow conquered the republic in 1478. Beneath the city, waterlogged cultural layers of the 10th to 17th centuries lie 7-8 metres deep and preserve wood and other organic material. The monuments were inscribed in 1992.