Saint George Cathedral Yuriev-Polsky

The St George cathedral was finished in 1234, the last great white stone church built before the Mongol invasion, and its whole exterior was covered in relief carving - saints, griffins, lions, centaurs, elephants, foliage running over every surface, the most elaborate scheme of its kind in Russia. In the 1470s the vaulting collapsed. Vasily Yermolin was sent to rebuild it, and he did, using the same stones - but he could not reconstruct the original arrangement, so the carved blocks went back in the wrong order, and what stands is the original twelfth-century sculpture reassembled as a puzzle solved wrongly. Figures are cut in half by joints, scenes run into unrelated scenes, and fragments sit sideways. The building is also lower and squatter than the original, which was taller. Scholars have spent a century trying to work out the intended arrangement from the surviving stones, and the reconstruction is still argued over.

What you actually see

• The carved surface - saints, griffins, lions and centaurs over the whole exterior.
• The wrong order - original stones reassembled in the 1470s in an arrangement nobody could recover.
• The broken scenes - figures cut by joints and fragments set sideways.
• The date - 1234, the last great pre-Mongol white stone church.

When to go

May to September; low sun brings the carving into relief. One hour. Ninety minutes by bus from Vladimir.

Honest expectations

The carving is worn and the jumbled arrangement makes it hard to read - it repays knowing the story first. The interior is plain and often closed. Yuriev-Polsky is a small town with few facilities and limited transport.

Nearby

Suzdal is north-east; Vladimir is south-east.