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 survive in the yellow pages of chronicles and decaying scraps of birch-bark letters.

The simplest method to tell what's what is overlaying pre-Catherine drawings on modem city plans. But, Valentin Yanin warns, it is a can of worms. A 1756 drawing was copied with many errors, and the original has not survived. A copy of the plan of Novgorod's central part as it was in the 1740s was published in 1861, but there are strong doubts about the strange dating-1701-of the alleged original. We have some city plans from the late 17th century. They, too, are a nightmare. First, their collation by experts has brought out geodetic errors. Which mounted if every new copy was not based on modern geodetic surveying principle, but only replicated an earlier drawing. It is not clear, then, whether or not the copyist had made the required corrections. Second, hardly any of the published plans was accompanied by a source analysis. Third, and last, old drawings are kept in different archives, and no clues about their whereabouts were frequently available.

His compulsive drive to improve the situation led Yanin, first, to broach a new discipline in archeology-a history of dynamic changes in the key ingredients of city defenses-and, as a next step toward his

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goal, write a book he entitled Plans of Novgorod the Great in the 17th-18th Centuries.

These things did not come the easy way, though. The scholar had browsed through piles of sources and turned over Novgorod's plans for two hundred years. That gave him an accurate yardstick to plan archeological excavation sites and identify streets dug up. The plans assembled in the book convey the dynamics of Novgorod's development over two centuries, including the period when its layout was overhauled completely, and are helpful in reconstructing the gathering changes as they actually occurred.

To give an example, 346 birch-bark documents, some 280 of them dating from the city's early period, were found at the Troitsk digging site (where archeologists under Valentin Yanin have been working since 1973). They helped identify the owners of the medieval estates unearthed here as "Klimata", "Olisei-Grechik", etc., instead of the impersonal "rich city dweller's household" or "household with a foundry shop". The extinct streets have won back their real-life names-Proboinaya, Chemitsyna or Yarisheva.

Says Valentin Yanin, "...I wrote [the book] some twenty years ago, but it could not be published then because of the silly censorship laws prohibiting publication of city plans, even if they had come down from the 17th century." His book was only published recently, in 1999, by Nauka Publishers. Even before it was out, its manuscript had helped archeologists many a time with problems they encountered in studying the medieval Novgorod's topography.

The book came out not a day later, now that the development of new master plans for old cities requires a critical reappraisal of their historical backgrounds. It advocates reliance on tradition, a requirement that must be met if we want to preserve the aesthetic role of old architectural masterpieces in a modem urban environment.

Yanin, V., Plans of Novgorod the Great in the 17th-18th Centuries, Nauchnaya Kniga, Nos. 1-2, 1999.

Yanin, V., Zaiiznyak, A., Birch-Bark Documents from 1998 Excavations in Novgorod, Vestnik RAN, Vol. 69, No. 7, 1999

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