Novgorod the Great is one of Russia's oldest cities. Its Old Town is a real open-air museum. Historians, geologists, architects, and art experts have joined forces in exploring, unearthing and restoring to their erstwhile condition the numerous architectural structures and murals dating from the 10th-17th centuries. While restorers are at work on a backlog of excavations many years long, archeologists continue digging up more evidence of everyday life, culture and social order as they have been for over a thousand years of the city's history. They have uncovered ruins of workshops where local craftsmen fashioned anything from such staples as simple earthenware and wooden tableware to exquisite jewelry Standing utterly apart from common artifacts are birch-bark documents and letters our distant ancestors wrote to one another- indeed, they seem to abound in every habitation layer. Mountains of earth have been cleared away on larger areas to reveal streets paved with wooden logs and lined with dwelling houses and outbuildings, fenced off with stockades along the boundaries of long-extinct rich men's estates. As yet another old street is brought out of oblivion, says Academician Valentin Yanin, its discoverers are faced with such challenges as placing it in the proper historical context and finding its toponym in the chronicles. Their counterparts in Moscow, the nation's capital, are unfamiliar with such problems. Moscow's oldest quarter, its center by long-standing tradition, lives on in its development projects since the city's birth, in fact. The modem Arbat or Sretenka streets have been laid for centuries over their predecessors of the same name. In Novgorod the Great, the city layout was altered drastically in the last quarter of the 18th century, when regular town planning, patterned on St. Petersburg, was introduced by the will of Empress Catherine II. The new layout wrought havoc with the existing plan, consigning many street names to nonexistence, which only s ... Читать далее