Saints Boris and Gleb Church in Plotniki, Veliky Novgorod, Orthodox church in northern Veliky Novgorod, Russia.
Saints Boris and Gleb Church is an Orthodox church featuring five domes and three vertical divisions on its exterior walls, each crowned with ogee-shaped arches and pointed roofs. The structure displays the characteristic design approach of 16th-century ecclesiastical architecture.
The 1536 brick church replaced an older church that was dismantled beforehand; its foundations were reused, giving the new building a plan close to 14th-century Novgorod churches. Residents of Zapolskaya and Konyukhova streets built it with Novgorod and Moscow merchants. Twenty Novgorod master builders finished the work in five months for 53 roubles. Closed in April 1937, it was restored by Z. I. Vasilyeva by 1955 and again by V. A. Popov, completed in 1991; it was returned to the Novgorod eparchy in 1992.
The church honors Boris and Gleb, the first Russian martyrs canonized by the Orthodox Church. These saints represent early Christian traditions from the Kievan Rus period.
The church stands on the right bank of the Volkhov in the Plotniki quarter, in the north-western corner of the Torgovaya side. It is an active parish of the Novgorod eparchy, returned to the church in 1992, so visits should be timed around services rather than treated as a museum stop. A monument to Prince Alexander Nevsky by sculptor Yuri Chernov (1985) stands a few metres to the south, and the Church of St John the Theologian on the Vitka is about 160 m to the north.
The five domes were unusual for Novgorod, where churches had carried a single dome from the 13th to the 15th century. The old church was not fully demolished: its foundations set the archaic plan of the 1536 building, while the facades follow 16th-century forms.
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