Vladimir ruled Rus for nearly two centuries, and the layers still stack up: the vault where Alexander Nevsky lay until 1723, a convent founded by Vsevolod's wife in 1200, and a 1783 prison that held a U-2 pilot.
Alexander Nevsky was buried here in 1263 and his relics stayed until Peter I moved them to St Petersburg in 1723. Founded in 1191, it was the chief monastery of Rus until 1561 and where the Laurentian Chronicle was copied in 1377.
Founded in 1200 by Maria Shvarnovna, wife of Vsevolod the Big Nest, as the burial vault for Vladimir's princesses and their daughters. The 16th-century Assumption Church keeps a full cycle of 1648 frescoes by Moscow master Mark Matveyev.
The red-brick 1900 museum holds white-stone carvings salvaged from Vsevolod's buildings, princely armour, and finds from the Sungir site — 30,000-year-old burials with 3,500 ivory beads sewn into the clothing.
Two churches stand on the site of Andrei Bogolyubsky's 1164 palace chapel: the Saviour-Transfiguration, rebuilt 1778 on the old foundations, and St Nicholas. The lane behind keeps the last wooden houses of the medieval craftsmen's quarter.
Catherine II's 1783 hard-labour prison later held Bolshevik Mikhail Frunze, Vasily Stalin, singer Lidia Ruslanova and U-2 pilot Gary Powers after 1960. The two-room museum by the gate shows cell doors, convict record cards and warders' uniforms.
Cast in 1958 for the city's 850th year, this three-sided obelisk in Pushkin Park carries seated bronze figures of an ancient warrior, an architect and a Soviet worker. Locals renamed them 'the three idlers' almost immediately.
The pseudo-Gothic water tower on the earthen ramparts was converted in 1975 into a museum of pre-revolutionary town life: tavern signs, fire-brigade gear, police reports and 1900s newspaper pages, ending on an open gallery under the roof.
Unveiled in 1975 for the 30th anniversary of victory, the memorial groups a mother, a soldier and a home-front worker in bronze around an eternal flame, with the war dead of the Vladimir region named on the granite wall behind.
Andrei Bogolyubsky built a fortified residence here in 1158. The stair tower where boyar conspirators killed him in 1174 survives inside a later church — the only piece of civil architecture left standing from pre-Mongol Rus.
Raised in 1165 in memory of Prince Izyaslav, it stands alone on a water meadow 1.5 km from Bogolyubovo, on an artificial stone hill built to survive floods. The cobbled path crosses the railway and the Nerl floodplain.
Vladimir's oldest street keeps the provincial pharmacy of 1805, now a museum of apothecary jars, herbal prescriptions and a carved wooden counter, alongside the Borodin family smithy and the old fire-watch tower.
The 1860s wooden merchant house where physicist Alexander Stoletov, who discovered the laws of the photoelectric effect, and General Nikolai Stoletov of the Shipka Pass campaign grew up. Family piano, lab notes and Balkan medals remain.