Suzdal

For many of its thousands of visitors, Suzan is the essence of enlightened tourist development in Russia. Bucolic, quaint, well-restored and beautifully picturesque, without the decay and disorder that often characterize farming areas in rural Russia, Suzdal seems the perfect setting of a bygone era, a community immune from the march of time.

In fact, this impression has been carefully cultivated for the sake of tourist revenue. More than one American guest has commented on the similarities between this small Russian town (population slightly over 12,000) and Colonial Williamsburg, in the state of Virginia, which also attempts to create an impression of life from the distant past on the background of a few preserved architectural monuments. To be sure, much more has survived of medieval Suzdal than of eighteenth-century Williamsburg, yet the notion of a national shrine where an illusion of the past can be preserved for masses of tourists is shared by both.

The Town that Time Forgot

Suzdal is by no means unique in the antiquity of its monuments; yet among surviving ancient Russian towns, Suzdal is rare in having almost no other existence apart from tourism. Indeed, Suzdal was so lost in time that it did not even have regularly scheduled bus service (to the district center of Vladimir) until 1956. During the 1870s, town authorities interested in progress and growth tried in vain to have a railroad spur built from nearby Vladimir. Ironically, their failure ensured that Suzdal’s greatest resource, its ensemble of architectural monuments, remained relatively unspoiled at a time when other medieval centers suffered from unregulated development.

There are many anecdotes about the fabled twentieth-century isolation of this once powerful medieval settlement, with its shuttered, abandoned churches and monasteries. Some of these buildings found prosaic uses, for storage and as places of detention. Others witnessed more dramatic events. In the spring of 1943, after their defeat at the battle of Stalingrad, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus and other high-ranking members of the German Sixth Army were brought to isolated Suzdal where they eventually met with prominent German communists for discussions about a post-war German socialist state. Paulus later wrote about these meetings, but one can only imagine the effect of this quiet town on the German “guests.”

According to a recent study of Suzdal by Yurii Belov, Suzdal had been designated by the USSR Academy of Architecture to receive funds for restoration as early as 1941. The onslaught of war interrupted these plans, but at least the idea of Suzdal’s resurrection had been introduced as a matter of national importance. These ideas would be realized in the 1960s with the designation of Suzdal as a major national site for historic preservation in the interests of tourism. In no small part, this recognition was due to the dedication of local historians and musuem workers such as Vasily Romanovskii, who founded the Suzdal Museum in 1921-22, and Aleksei Varganov, who became the director of the museum in 1931 and maintained a passionate enthusiasm for the town until his death in 1977. Under daunting conditions, the commitment by museum workers to the cause of preservation stemmed from an understanding of Suzdal’s rare architectural and cultural heritage at a time when such interests were often considered useless and even subversive of the new Soviet order.

Early Settlement

What is it about Suzdal that inspired such devotion on the part of preservationists? Although it was soon eclipsed by other medieval centers, Suzdal was one of the earliest settlements in the Russian heartland. The first mention of the town occurs under the year 1024, but there were undoubtedly settlements there in the ninth and tenth centuries. By the early eleventh century, representatives of political and religious authority from Kiev extended their control into this agriculturally rich territory, making it an object of dispute among warring princely factions. By the turn of the twelfth century, the Kievan Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh had created a new citadel for Suzdal and had endowed its first Orthodox cathedral, apparently the earliest major brick structure in the entire territory of northeastern Rus.

In the middle of the twelfth century, Suzdal was part of the domains of Yuri Dolgoruky, the founder of Moscow. He, in fact, made it capital of the powerful Rostov-Suzdal principality. Yuri’s son and successor, Andrei Bogolyubsky, preferred neighboring Vladimir at the expense of Suzdal (changing the region’s center to the former, whence the region became known as Vladimir-Suzdal), but the next ruler, Vsevolod III (half-brother of Andrei), undertook an extensive repair of the Suzdal cathedral in 1194 (and, in the 13th century, Suzdal was made the capital of the Suzdal principality). This proved to be a temporary measure, however, and in 1222 one of Vsevolod’s sons, George (or Yurii), razed the brick cathedral in Suzdal and erected a magnificent new white stone structure dedicated to the Nativity of the Virgin. During the 1230s, the rich decoration of the interior was complemented by frescoes and a few mosaics near the altar. This cathedral withstood the sack of Suzdal by the Mongols in 1238, even though the interior was completely pillaged. In 1281 and 1293, Suzdal was again subjected to devastating Mongol raids. From the early 1200s until the middle of the following century, Suzdal was an independent principality. But, over the course of the fourteenth century, its power waned with the rise of Moscow.

Through decades marked by plague, famine, and invasion, the Suzdal Nativity Cathedral stood, until 1445, when a raiding force of Kazan Tartars took the town and set fire to the cathedral interior. This so weakened the roof vaulting that the upper part of the building collapsed. Not until 1528-1530 did Moscow’s Grand Prince Basil III undertake to rebuild the cathedral as part of his campaign of restoring the ancient heritage of the Russian lands under the protection of Moscow. During this reconstruction, the remaining stone walls were uniformly lowered to the level of a “blind” (i.e. solid) arcade at the top of the first floor, while the upper structure and the drums beneath the five cupolas were rebuilt of new brick, in the style of large Muscovite churches.

Fortunately, much of the original thirteenth-century limestone carving was preserved, including the ornamental columns of the arcade band as well as the carved lions and female masks (implying the sacred image of the Virgin Mary) that decorate the cathedral at its corners and along its facades. This emphasis on the ornamental function of carved stonework stands in contrast to the array of religious images on the surface of other stone churches built in the Vladimir area by Vsevolod III at the end of the twelfth century. However, the Suzdal cathedral has images of its own covering the surface of the great “Golden Doors” of the west portal (around 1233), and on a later pair of doors within the south portal (around 1248). The depiction of religious scenes and Orthodox saints in the panels of both portal doors were executed by applying gold foil onto copper plate. Miraculously, these valuable artifacts survived the turbulent and often destructive events inflicted upon the cathedral.

Still More Tribulation

The seventeenth century was a time of further trials for the Suzdal area. During the Time of Troubles, after the death of Tsar Boris Godunov in 1605, Suzdal authorities tried to proclaim loyalty to the rapidly changing rulers in Moscow, but this did not spare the town from the depredations of marauding bands of Lithuanians, who came to Moscow in support of various Polish claimants to the throne. Indeed, it was a Suzdal nobleman, Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, who raised an army that would eventually rid Moscow of the Polish occupiers and create the security necessary for the founding of the new Romanov dynasty.

Yet even after the establishment of peace in Moscow, Suzdal met with further travail: Crimean Tartars raided the town in 1634, and the plague, or “Black Death,” struck in the 1650s. But despite these setbacks, there were sufficient funds to commission a new set of frescoes for the interior of the Nativity Cathedral. It would appear that the Orthodox Church succeeded so well in maintaining its sources of income that, in 1646, residents of the town complained bitterly to Tsar Aleksei about the church’s abuse of economic power at the expense of the town. After another fire swept through Suzdal in 1719, the upper part of the cathedral underwent repairs that gave it a baroque appearance; but that changed yet again in 1748, when the cupolas gained their great flaring onion shape, and a sloped roof was placed over the rounded gables. The cathedral remained in this form until the 1950s, when a major restoration brought back the curved roof line of the sixteenth century, while retaining the eighteenth-century onion domes.

Basil’s Churches

In a sense, the entire history of Suzdal can be seen through the history of its Nativity Cathedral. We can also see how attitudes toward the preservation of such great monuments varied over the centuries. Suzdal, however, has many other landmarks of antiquity, especially its monastic institutions, whose history occasionally rivals that of the cathedral itself for drama and mystery. Among the most beautiful is the Intercession, or Pokrovsky, Convent, founded in 1364. On entering the convent, now returned to the Orthodox Church, one passes underneath the expressive forms of the Annunciation Gate Church, completed around 1515. This intricate brick structure with three small cupolas is interesting not only in itself, but also because it reproduces in miniature the general outline of the main convent church, dedicated to the Intercession of the Virgin and built by command of Moscow’s Grand Prince Basil III in 1510-1514.

The Intercession Church, constructed of brick and painted white, has ornamental features typical of fifteenth-century Muscovite architecture, such as the pointed kokoshniki on the roof; yet it also has details typical of early Suzdal architecture, such as blind arcading on the facade and a row of rounded gables, or zakomary, at the roofline. One of the most intriguing aspects of the cathedral is a polygonal bell tower at the southwest corner. It originally had a chapel on its second floor and, although the upper level was rebuilt in the seventeenth century, it may have been one of the earliest examples in Muscovy of a brick tower with a conical roof.

All of the structures described above were commissioned as votive churches by Basil III and his first wife, Solomonia Saburova, in supplication for the birth of a male heir. Tragically, in 1525 the looming dynastic crisis compelled Basil, with the support of the church, to anull his marriage to Solomonia, who entered this same convent whose churches had arisen a decade before in supplication for the birth of a son. (Not until his second marriage, to Elena Glinskaya, did Basil finally gain a heir, Ivan IV, subsequently known as “the Terrible.”) Solomonia was only one among many women of high position who were subsequently compelled to take the vows in this convent. Others included Anna Vasilchikova (one of Ivan the Terrible’s wives) and Peter the Great’s first wife, Evdokia Lopukhina.

A number of Suzdal’s monasteries received significant patronage from members of the tsar’s family, as well as from wealthy nobles and merchants. The larger ones initiated massive expansion, such as the great walled citadel and twelve towers of the Savior-St. Evfimy Monastery in Suzdal, built in the 1660s. The monastery, founded in 1350, possessed over 10,000 serfs in the late seventeenth century, and may have attempted to imitate the Moscow Kremlin in its fortress design. Indeed, over the past three decades, both Russian and foreign film companies have used the red-brick walls of this monastery as a substitute for Moscow’s fortress. The largest tower, 22 meters in height, provides an imposing entrance with its size and ornamental facade.

As the burial place of Prince Dmitri Pozharsky, who died in 1642, this monastery had the character of a secular shrine and was much used for purposes of state at the turn of the eighteenth century. The monastery’s main church, dedicated to the Transfiguration of the Savior, took its present shape at the end of the sixteenth century, although it was subsequently modified many times. The bright, colorful frescoes that cover the interior were painted in 1689 by a group of masters from Kostroma. Alas, this monastery also has its macabre secrets. In the 1760s it was designated as a place of incarceration for “deranged criminals,” a number of whom seem to have been only foolish enough to publicly express negative opinions about the autocratic regime. Records show that several of these unfortunates were held without trial for many years in the monastery isolation cells.

At present, Suzdal, with its colorful parish churches and monasteries, seems remote from these darker pages in its history. Yet even today, controversy looms in the form of conflicting claims over church property. Having restored some previously closed churches, the newly-formed Free Orthodox Church is facing demands from the much larger Russian Orthodox Church for the return of this property. One hopes that these problems can be resolved peacefully, as the practice of religion regains its place in Russian society. In the meantime, large numbers of tourists will continue to visit the quiet streets marked by ancient churches, as well as the popular open-air museum of wooden architecture, consisting of log structures brought from other regions and reassembled in a small “village.” Whatever the artificial elements of Suzdal as a tourist complex, with its large hotel hidden from view, the town’s distinctive monuments from a turbulent past deserve to be seen and enjoyed in their current peaceful setting.