Vladimir Souzdal

Friday 4th August 2017

A taxi picked us up early at 6.30am at the hostel in Nizhny Novgorod and dropped us at the train station where we took the 7.39am train to Vladimir. This time the train ride was roughly 2 hours only.

When we left the train station, we saw a small Railway Museum near it from the train.

We arrived in Vladimir around 9.40am, took a taxi to the hotel, dropped the bags and got another taxi driver to take us to Souzdal. There was a lot of fields on our right while heading there.

Vladimir counts around 350,000 inhabitants while Souzdal has only about 10,000 inhabitants. Souzdal is on the ‘Golden Ring’, a cluster of historically important cities surrounding Moscow. There were lots of horse carriages in Souzdal like these ones.

First, we went to the Kremlin where we visited the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin. This is one of the oldest cathedrals of Russia. It was built between 1222 and 1224, in two years only. The upper tier was built again in 1530. There are frescoes from the 13th and 17th centuries in it. Not far from it was a wooden church, the Church of St Nicholas.

We left the Kremlin and walked back towards the centre. We went to a small tourist shops area where we had some lunch at a place called Yaniyou. From there we had a beautiful view over the river and fields.

In that area was some cool iron work.

We continued our walk and saw some cool horse carriages and other churches.

We also found the seller of summer berries. There were so many choices. We got strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. I would have liked to buy all of them and eat them all or make a lot of jam! Yummy!!!

We also saw some beautiful wooden houses.

Then we visited the Monastery of the Saviour and St Euthimius who was founded in 1352. In there, we saw the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of the Saviour which had impressive 17th century frescoes.

While sitting outside on a bench, this man started a bells concert.

Then we left and started walking back to the centre. We saw those 2 boys riding a bicycle together.

We took a taxi back to Vladimir and visited this church and watched the sunset view over the valley. There was a traffic jam on the bridge which was interesting to watch from far up. We walked back through the park. There was a photo of the church with Poutine in front of it with who you could pose shaking his hand.