Museums, Pskov tomorrow

This week we've been going to some museums in Novgorod. On Tuesday we went to the meseum of wooden architecture where they've recreated a small wooden village show casing the building techniques of the early people here. It was very interesting to see. Its all open-air/outdoors, and you can pretty much walk aroundd whereever you want, and some of the buildings are open to go walk through and visit. The architectural techniques were pretty impressive for their time. Apparently metal for use as nails was really expensive in these parts, so everything was build so nothing needed to be nailed together, everything with notches and such (like lincoln logs, but more so).

Today we went to the archeological meseum. Novgorod is a very old city, of course, and coupled with some lucky environmental factors, a lot of ancient things were preserved in the soil. So, we saw a lot of things that from knives and arrows, to birch bark writing (usually religious), and weapons such as somewhat primitive looking axes and spears. They also has some pieces of the old wooden roads that were actually in decent shape. Later on a lot of stuff came in from Europe on trade routes, and so we got to see things from as far as France that ended up in the soil here. You could also track the religious history of the city by looking at religious ornaments and such. At first they were "pagans" (which is a way too generalized term if you ask me, but I guess it describes it), and you could see a lot of traditional symbols. and later, you can see the influence of christianity. During the transitionary period, you could see things like amulets with pagan symbols on one side, and christian on the other. As our teacher (and guide) said, you could imagine someone standing on the bank of a river praying for Jesus to save him from the evil water spirits. Funny imagery.

Tomorrow we are going on a day trip to Pskov. It is going to be quite a long trip, I think its about 3 hours by bus each way, so I am going to try and sleep on the trip. There is a very old monastary there was left pretty much untouched in Soviet times, so we are going to see it, and hopefully we will get to go into the catacombs as well. Liza told us that the monks arbitrarily let people in or not, so we can't be guarteed admittance to that particular part of the trip. I'll take pictures and post them either friday or early next week.