Suzdal

Suzdal is one of the towns of the famous Golden Ring of Russia. It is a town, founded in the 11th century with its unique architectural ensemble, located 200 km away from Moscow. 

A picturesque green town, where you can at the same time feel the russian country life and enjoy walks around fairy tale dome convents. Inside Suzdal the atmosphere is as if nothing had changed since the nineteenth century, goats, chicken and cows graze freely next to the kremlin and monasteries, and on the grassy lanes.

The hilly green town, that looks more like a village, is very seducing, walking around is a pleasure, the monasteries offer dreaming views…

But of course as for the rest of Russia there are stricking contrasts: you would await a village bakery, and village made cheese, but the soviet system still remains and, for example, the only bread you'll find is made by the factory for Vladimir's area and is only sold in food shops. Also the small picturesque village seems to live in the ancient way only in the center: the outskirts are built with high concrete buildings.

The Kremlin is historically the core of Suzdal, that's where the town has started. At the beginning the Kremlin was surrounded by dams made of ground, on which there were wooden walls with towers, and next to the dams there were trenches filled with water, to protect the town. Now there are only some dams and trenches left (no wooden walls anymore), that don't look so intimidating as they were 800 year ago, but provide a very good position to have a view on the town.

By the way, if you look on the opposite shore of Kamenka river, where there's silver domed Ioanna Predtechi church, you'll see a nice place to camp on the field next to the church.

If you walk back to the Lenina street and walk up, you'll see the old Saviour-Euthimiev monastery-fortress. It was founded by the prices of Suzdal - Nizhni-Novgorod principalities in the middle of the 14th century. First, there were just a few wooden buildings, but when in the 16th-17th centuries Russian princes, tsars, and nobles donated bulk of their fortunes to the monastery, a new monastery-fortress was built there.