72. Church of St. Nicho­las from the village of Glotovo. 1766

Not far from the cathedral, in the west part of the kremlin, is the wooden Church of St. Nicholas (1766) built in the village of Glotovo in the heart of the Yuryev district and transferred to Suzdal in 1960 (Ill. 72). It was brought here as one of the first steps to set up an open air museum of Russian architecture in Suzdal. There are comparatively few surviving specimens of old wooden architecture in central Russia and this building is an excellent specimen of the early type of wooden church in which the main body is very similar to the basic unit of an ordinary peasant's house. Both consist of simple rectangles built of round logs laid horizontally and inter­locking at the corners. The Church of St. Nicholas is ele­vated over a ground storey and surrounded on three sides by a raised gallery. The main, rectangular body of the church is adjoined on the west side by the somewhat lower building of the refectory, trapeza, where people could shelter and partake of refreshment, and on the cast side by a faceted altar apse. The steeply pitched plank roofs and tiny dome with scaly shingles make this small, simple building with its somewhat dumpy lower sections look remarkably slender and imposing. We shall see similar designs based on traditional forms going back over the centuries in small seventeenth- and eighteenth-century heated stone churches in Suzdal and a house dating from the same period near the Spaso-Yevfimiev Monastery (Ill. 102). The clear-cut outline of the Church of St. Nicholas fits quite naturally into the kremlin ensemble and the town as a whole, showing the close relationship between stone and wooden architec­ture.

Looking north from the ramparts we can see the quiet river Kamenka, now overgrown with sedge, at the foot of the hill on which the town is situated. On the right above the steep slope of the river's left bank there is a group of eighteenth-century churches: the Church of the Entry into Jerusalem and the Church of St. Paraskeva, with the Church of the Resurrection behind them. Fur­ther on you can see the Church of St. Lazarus and the tall bell-tower of the Convent of the Deposition of the Robe with its famous double gateway and two tent-shaped spires (Ill. 81). To the left is the solid red and white square tower of the Spaso-Yevfimiev Monastery and the tops of the bell-tower and church in the Monas­tery of St. Alexander. Straight ahead of us in a slight hollow on the right bank are the churches of the Epiphany and the Nativity with a graceful, tent-shaped bell-tower beside them. Behind them in the distance one can just make out the Convent of the Intercession and the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul.

Further west on the top of the right bank is the gleaming white Church of Our Lady of Tikhvin which stands on the site of the old St. Andrew Monastery. All these different buildings give the town a fascinating out­line.

73. Church of St. Nicholas. 1720-1739

Proceeding along the western ramparts we see a small lake down below on the left, the remains of the artificial moat. Across the river on Ivanova Hill is the half-ruined Church of the Prophet Elijah built in 1744 on the spot where there was a seventeenth-century settlement of the Metropolitan's bobyli, a type of recluse.

Further left, still on the right bank of the Kamenka and nearer to the corner of the kremlin, there was once the Monastery of St. Boris and St. Gleb founded before the sixteenth century. The stone Church of St. Boris and St. Gleb now stands on this spot, restored by Alexei Varganov in 1961. It is the only building in Suzdal which shows a fairly strong influence of Russian seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Baroque architecture. The gen­eral composition and volute motif of the bell-tower arc similar to those on the bell-tower of the Church of St. Nicetas in Vladimir (Ill.40), but the church itself, an octa­gon on a square base, resembles the Church of St. Nicho­las at the Galleys (Ill. 4). However the Suzdal church differs from both these buildings by virtue of its greater simplicity and powerful, expressive lines. Its propor­tions create an impression of strength and the decora­tion, which stands out clearly against the background of the red walls, is extremely rich and plastic. The cornice on the main octagon is particularly fine, combining ele­gance and sumptuousness.

The Dmitri Gates originally stood on the southwest corner of the kremlin ramparts. Facing them on the opposite bank was Suzdal's oldest monastery, the Monastery of St. Dmitri built at the end of the eleventh century, as we have mentioned earlier. A small tent-shaped wooden church remained standing on this spot right up to the seventeenth century, when the Metropol­itan Illarion had it replaced by a new wooden church which was "most large, tall and splendid, encircled on two sides by parvises and adorned most fair inside". This interesting building must have stood out well in the general panorama of the town during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Following the southern ramparts along the Kamenka to the southeast corner of the kremlin we come to one of the finest specimens of eighteenth-century Suzdal architecture, the Church of St. Nicholas (1720-1739) which replaced a tent-shaped wooden church of the same name burnt down in 1719. The new church (111. 73) was restored in I960 by Olga Guseva. There must have been a Church of St. Nicholas on this spot right from the early days because the old town gates nearby leading to a bridge over the Kamenka were called the St. Nicholas Gates. St. Nicholas was the patron saint of sailors and travellers which explains why the church here was dedi­cated to him. The Gates led to distant waterways and highways. The Church of St. Nicholas at the Galleys in Vladimir was also situated not far from the jetty.

The present one in Suzdal is a very fine building, com­bining seventeenth-century forms with new features. It is cube-shaped with beautiful portals, elegant window surrounds, and a wide cornice surmounted by a row of small kokoshniks. In the centre of the hipped roof there is a slender, elongated dome drum decorated with two rows of blind arcading. It is possible that the church originally had five domes. The building is adjoined on its west side by a small narthex-type refectory linking it with the bell-tower. The latter is beautifully propor­tioned and decorated. Its design is based on the old type of tent-shaped wooden church consisting of an octagon on a square base. The corners on top of the square base are decorated with tiny tent-shaped pinnacles. The base of the octagon is decorated with kokoshniks, repeating the motif above the cornice on the main body of the church. Above these is a row of square niches sur­mounted by another row of Baroque octagonal niches and a broad indented .cornice with a band of coloured tiles, which separated the octagon from the bell-tier. The latter is extremely lavishly decorated with rusticated pil­lars surmounted by cornices, moulded arches and, here again, a broad cornice with a row of tiles. The higher up the more elaborate the decoration becomes. The corners on top of the octagonal bell-tier repeat the motif on the corners of the square base in the form of tiny Gothic-like pinnacles, crowned with crosses, which em­phasise the size and height of the tent-shaped spire. The latter's concave form was an innovation of the Suzdal builders. The traditional tiny slit windows were replaced by round lucarne windows. Only right at the top of the spire were the windows given tiny decorative surrounds enhancing the impression of height. The bell-tower was crowned with a small helmet-shaped dome. The un­known architect of the Church of St. Nicholas was clearly a very gifted master with a keen sense of architectural rhythm and the effective use of decoration. He was ob­viously in touch with the new trends in architecture but felt more affinity with older Suzdalian styles. It is quite likely that he was a native of Suzdal.

The church was an unheated one and formed a pair with the smaller heated Church of the Nativity nearby built in 1775 with a nineteenth-century parvis. We shall see many other examples of paired churches. The small, heated ones are usually very simple and unassuming in design and often resemble a single-storey dwelling or the square-shaped wooden church like the one from Glotovo (Ill. 72). Basically they are stone replicas of the rectangular log structure that goes to make up a simple peasant izba with the usual saddleback roof. Here we have an excellent example of the way that traditional domestic wooden architecture continued to influence stone churches even as late as the eighteenth century. The combination of these simple heated churches with the main church emphasises the latter's importance and grandeur and frequently groups of this kind form a very picturesque ensemble.