Nizhny Novgorod stacks its past in layers: monasteries founded the year the city was, Baroque churches paid for by salt fortunes, a trade fair that moved goods from Persia to Paris, and the Soviet closed city where Sakharov was exiled.
Founded in 1221 alongside the city itself and rebuilt in stone after a rockslide destroyed it, this terraced Oka-slope monastery centres on the five-domed Annunciation Cathedral of 1649. Free entry, open 07:00-19:00; 17th-century icons and a seminary museum inside.
Built in stone in 1655 on the rise where, during the 1505 Tatar siege, a cannon shot felled the Nogai commander and broke the assault. The red-and-white bell tower still anchors the Ilyinskaya Street craftsmen's quarter. Free; daily services from 08:00.
Founded in 1328 by St Dionysius and rebuilt on this Volga terrace after a landslide swallowed the original site in 1597. The 1632 Ascension Cathedral, tented bell tower and diocesan museum survive as a full 17th-century ensemble.
The Stroganov salt dynasty's 1719 church piles carved limestone fruit, shells and vines over a red-brick body — Russian Baroque at full theatrical volume. Legend says Peter I ordered it closed out of envy. The bell tower's astronomical clock still runs.
The 1877 Italianate palace of banker Sergei Rukavishnikov, whose gilded ballroom, mirrored staircase and stucco caryatids survived nationalisation intact. It now houses the city's Historical-Architectural Museum-Reserve collections.
Russia's greatest trade fair relocated here in 1817 after Makaryev burned, and by the 1890s moved Persian silk, Siberian furs and Volga grain in one season. The 1890 pseudo-Russian Main House holds the fair history exposition.
The ground-floor flat at Gagarina 214 where the physicist and dissident spent his 1980-86 internal exile under permanent KGB watch. Furniture, hunger-strike notes and the telephone installed overnight in 1986 for Gorbachev's call are in place.
Vera Mukhina's 1952 bronze shows the writer at thirty, coat flaring in the wind, worked up from photographs of his 1902 police-supervised residence in the city. The granite plinth carries lines from 'Song of the Stormy Petrel'.
The dyer's cottage in the Pochainsky ravine where the orphaned Alexei Peshkov — later Gorky — was raised from 1871. Reconstructed room by room from 'My Childhood': the dye workshop, the vats, the corner where his grandfather beat him.
The commercial artery under the kremlin cliff, where barge traffic met fair money: 19th-century banks, grain warehouses, the former stock exchange and the 1878 Blinov Passage built by peasant-born millionaire grain traders.
The eleven rooms Gorky rented from 1902 to 1904 at the height of his fame, kept as on the day he left: his study, Chaliapin's armchair, and the dining table where Chekhov, Repin and Andreyev argued past midnight.
The old craftsmen's suburb kept its carved wooden houses and small brick trading yards. At Ilyinskaya 33 the Museum of the Nizhny Novgorod Intelligentsia recreates a 1900s doctor's apartment, down to the medical bag and sheet music.