During its most prestigious and wealthy period - from the twelfth to the fifteenth century - Novgorod's republican-minded nobles bestowed a fantastic architectural legacy upon the town, including a Kremlin (a fortified inner city), Russia's oldest cathedral and numerous onion-domed stone churches. However, the foundation of St Petersburg in 1703 was a great blow to Novgorod's commercial prosperity, with the final straw coming in 1851, when the new rail line linking Moscow and St Petersburg bypassed the town entirely.

The impressive, nine-metre-high, red-brick walls of the Kremlin date from the fifteenth century, when they formed the inner ring of an entire series of fortifications. As many as eighteen churches and 150 houses were once crammed inside these walls, though much of the Kremlin now consists of open space. The Kremlin's main landmark is St Sophia's Cathedral (Sofiyskiy sobor), the city's earliest and largest cathedral by far, representing the peak of princely power in Novgorod and afterwards a symbol of great civic pride, its five bulbous domes clustered around a slightly raised, golden helmet dome. The cathedral now doubles as a working church and museum (daily 10am-6pm, closed last Tues of every month; there may be an entry charge). Inside, the well-preserved iconostasis is one of the oldest in Russia and includes works from the eleventh to seventeenth centuries.

The largest building in the Kremlin is an early-nineteenth-century mass of administrative offices; nowadays it is home to the Museum of History, Architecture and Art (daily except Tues 10am-6pm; closed last Thurs of every month; $3), and contains a fine collection of icons by the colourful Novgorod School, along with paintings, embroideries and early wooden sculpture.

From the riverbank on the east side of the Kremlin, there's a great view of the Commercial Side (Torgovaya storona), site of Novgorod's medieval market. All that remains now is a long section of the old seventeenth-century arcade. Immediately behind the arcade, where the palace of Yaroslav the Wise once stood, is a grassy area still known as Yaroslav's Court (Yaroslavovo dvorishche). Its most important surviving building is the Cathedral of St Nicholas (Nikolskiy sobor; daily except Tues 10am-6pm), built in 1113 in a Byzantine style that was a deliberate challenge to St Sophia's.

All that survives of the Yuryev Monastery (Yuryev monastyr), founded by Prince Vsevolod in 1117, is the majestic Cathedral of St George (Georgievskiy sobor), which was built by a "Master Peter", renowned as the first truly Russian architect, and which is one of the last great churches to be built by the Novgorod princes. Inside, some twelfth-century frescoes survive, but most date from the nineteenth century. The cathedral has been rapidly restored in recent years and the monastery revived - you should dress accordingly (covered head and no trousers for women). In the woods nearby is the Vitoslavitsy Museum of Wooden Architecture (daily except Wed: May to mid-Sept 10am-6pm; mid-Sept to April 10am-4pm; $5), an inspiring collection of timber constructions moved here from the surrounding area, including two churches and several peasant houses, with some of the buildings dating from the sixteenth century.

If you need somewhere to stay , try Sadko , Fyodorovskiy ruchey 16 (tel 812/754 37; A?20-25/$32-40), a budget hotel on the Commercial Side. As far as restaurants go, everyone rightly goes to the Detinets (Mon 11am-4pm, Tues-Sun 11am-5pm & 7-11pm), in the Pokrov Tower of the Kremlin. It has a cafA© downstairs and a relaxed restaurant upstairs, which has the occasional bit of live music in the evening; prices are low.