History and Culture: Exhibition "Church of St. George in Staraya Ladoga" from the collection of the Staraya Ladoga Museum-Reserve presented in Veliky Novgorod

The exhibition "St. George Church in Staraya Ladoga", provided by the Staraya Ladoga Museum-Reserve, is opened in the main building of the Novgorod Museum-Reserve. The exposition features the history of construction, architectural features and frescoes of one of the oldest churches in Russia - the Church of St. George (XII century). The posters show photographs of the temple's frescoes, reconstruction projects for separate interior walls, plans, diagrams, old photographs (late XIX - early XX centuries) and drawings of the church.

The temple's frescoes, created by a high-skilled Byzantine-Russian crew of artists, take an outstanding place in the history of medieval culture. The most of wall painting crumbled in the middle of the XV century, when "in the summer of 6953 (1445) ...Archbishop Euphimius renewed a St. George Monastery in Ladoga, a stone wall and the Church of St. George, which frescoes fell away and exfoliated...".

During the following centuries, the church was renewed many times, including changes in the portal roofs and floors, the whitewashing of frescoes. In the XX century, there were multiple restorations of the original temple's interiors to open and reinforce the preserved ancient frescoes. About 150 square meters of the original painting survived on the walls. There are also about 50 square meters of fragments of frescoes discovered during excavations. The fragments bring a new idea of the art concept of the painting and the temple's interior as a whole. Fragments of frescoes with images of faces, clothing, relevant inscriptions, subjects and ornamental compositions allow researchers to get information about the time of the temple's creation and the painters' crew. Fragments of the ruined frescoes collected all together provide a unique opportunity to recreate an invaluable masterpiece of the monumental painting of Ancient Rus'.

The exhibition will run until November 1.