The small Convent of Saint Alexander is situated on high coast of river Kamenka. According to seventeenth-century records it was founded by Saint Grand Duke Alexander Nevsky in 1240.
The Convent was greatly favoured by the early Moscow princes Ivan Kalita and his son Ivan II. Nothing remains of this very early period, except two gravestones with inscriptions, telling us that the Suzdal princesses Mariya (1362) and Agrippina (1393) were buried here.
In the first half of the eighteenth century the Convent was surrounded by a low wall with little decorative towers, consisting of a square base with corner pilaster strips and a slender brick tent-shaped spire with imitation tiny windows. These miniature towers were obviously a copy of larger ones.
In the south side of the wall there are the Holy Gates, whose faceted tiered drum with its triangular top repeats those on the Trinity Cathedral in the Convent of the Deposition of the Robe.
Through the gates on an open piece of ground stands the large Church of the Ascension, built in 1695 on funds provided by Peter "The Great's" mother, the Tsaritsa Natalia Kirillovna in place of a tent-shaped wooden Church.
The adornments of the Church of the Ascension contains nearly all the features, which we can see in other specimens of late Suzdalian architecture, and here too they are employed in such a way as to create a building with an entirely original character of its own. The main south wall is designed with great clarity and logic, and the architect has introduced a considerable measure of order into the decoration without reducing it to cold symmetry. The shadows of the windows and portal and the fine outline of the cornice emphasise the large white surfaces of the walls. The corners of the square main body of the Cathedral are decorated with light, narrow pilaster strips, whereas the apse is adorned with paired half-columns. The adornments of the drums repeats that of the window surrounds: small semi-columns with bead moulding that looks like a string of pearls round the neck of the dome.
The bell-tower is situated separately. Its low square base carries a very tall slender octagon with a more elaborately decorated belfry and a tent-shaped spire with long narrow windows.
From the high coast of Kamenka there is an excellent view to the Intercession Convent, standing on the right bank of the river.