The Convent of the Intercession was founded in 1364, but nothing has survived from this early period. The present buildings date back to the first half of the sixteenth century and later.
The Intercession Convent is situated on the right bank of river Kamenka. Its white buildings surrounded by a low wall with towers. The Convent walls were already partly built of stone in the sixteenth century, but the present ones belong to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The older sections have retained the design used for real fortified walls. On the inside there are blind arches supporting a wooden defensive gallery along the upper section of the walls. Higher up still is a brick parapet with narrow loopholes. In the northern half of the Convent walls a number of seventeenth-century tent-shaped towers have survived, extremely austere and almost completely devoid of adornments. They were never used for defensive purposes. It is interesting, that there is a second wall between the outer walls and the Convent itself, surrounding a special inner courtyard. The eighteenth-century towers are more elaborate. Their octagonal bodies are divided into tiers by horizontal bands and the niches of the narrow windows in the upper tier create the impression of a decorative arcade band. This suggests that the architect may have wanted to reproduce the rich adornments on the main tower of the Spaso-Yevfimiev Monastery. It is possible that the eighteenth-century towers were originally crowned with wooden, tent-shaped spires like those of the older towers.

Between 1510 and 1518 the Moscow ruler Grand Prince Vasiliy III sent rich gifts to the Orthodox Church in Russia, Constantinople and Mount Athos. During the same period he also endowed the Convent of the Intercession with gifts and many new buildings. The new Churches were dedicated to the Intercession of the Virgin Mary, the Annunciation, and the Conception of Saint Anne. He, with his wife Solomonia Saburova, prayed the God about a birth of children.
In 1525 Solomonia took the veil in the Convent of the Nativity in Moscow, and later - in the Suzdal Intercession Convent. About the tomb of Saint Solomonia miracles have started to be made, and She was glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1650.

The main entrance into the Convent was through the Holy Gates in the south wall, which were topped by the gateway Church of the Annunciation. Like many other buildings in the Convent these were built around 1518 and commissioned by Vasiliy III. They are one of the most original and finest specimens of sixteenth-century Suzdal architecture.
The large archway is placed somewhat to the east. In the adjoining wall there is a staircase. Above the gateway is a small Church, which have a vaulted ceiling. Its walls, crowned with zakomaras, surmounted by a dome over a row of kokoshniks, rise above the roofs of the narrow Church porches that surround the Church on three sides with open arches.
At the east ends of the gallery there are two tiny chapels like miniature Churches each with its own kokoshniks and little dome. There is something almost toy-like about this intimate little Church obviously intended for private services at which only two or three people would be present.
The Church's three domes remind one again of the old triple-domed Cathedral in the Kremlin. Due to the Church's miniature dimensions the apses are barely distinguishable in the interior and only just visible on the outside.
The main south wall of the Holy Gates is decorated from top to bottom with bands of ornamental brickwork framed with round structured posts and niches of different sizes. These are arranged somewhat haphazardly as if the builder had carved them from wood instead of laying them in brick. This interesting feature gives the building an air of simplicity.
If you enter inside the Convent through the Holy Gates, you would see all of its main buildings, set out one after the other in the centre of the courtyard which was surrounded on all sides by rows of cells. As early as the sixteenth century some of the cells were made of stone, as well as certain of the Convent 's domestic buildings, such as the brewery, the cellars and the ice chambers used for storing food.
In the Southwest corner of the Convent there is an early seventeenth-century brick building known as the "trial chamber" (sudnaya palata). The building has another structure of a similar type partly restored in the Northwest corner of the Convent.

The main building in the whole ensemble is the Cathedral of the Intercession, which has only recently been restored to its original form.
To make the Cathedral stand out in the expanding town panorama its short drums were lengthened and given light elongated cupolas, a hip roof was built to cover the bases of the old domes, and the arches of the galleries were blocked up and adjoined by new porches with light, tiled pillars. All this altered the original appearance of the Cathedral (1510-1518) considerably.
The large, four-pillar body of the Cathedral with three massive apses is raised on a high ground storey which served as a burial vault for nuns of noble birth. The tomb of Solomonia occupied the place of honour in the Southwest corner. The surface of the burial vault outer wall was broken only by the openings of small windows.
At the Northwest and Southwest corners there are staircases leading up to the gallery, with corner arches resting on large round pillars. Through the open arcade of the gallery one can see the Cathedral's sumptuous portals, and above the roofs of the gallery rises the huge, square body of the Cathedral divided by flat pilaster strips and decorated with a decorative arcade band, similar to that on the old Cathedral of the Nativity in the Kremlin.
The latter also appears to have influenced the asymmetrical arrangement of the stately three-domed roof. The central dome on its powerful cylindrical base decorated with large kokoshniks is particularly impressive.
The majestic austerity of the cathedral provides a sharp contrast to the lavishly decorated, intimate atmosphere of the gateway Church of the Annunciation. Its lack of decoration, bare walls and heavy domes which look like blocks of hewn stone are explained by the fact that the Cathedral is the main building in the Convent.
The interior is equally austere with its strong the pillars and broad vaulting. Restoration work revealed some interesting features. The floor was paved with black ceramic tiles. There was no painting on the walls. In the lower part of the walls there were small niches where the nuns kept their prayer-books, each having her own strictly appointed place. The restorers discovered loopholes below the windows in the east side of the Cathedral which suggest that its builder, Vasiliy III, anticipated some kind of trouble and took precautions to fortify the Convent against attack from the outside.

Opposite the Southwest corner of the building stands a tent-shaped bell-tower which was connected to the Cathedral porch by a covered gallery in the eighteenth century. This is an extremely interesting specimen of early Russian architecture. Its lower, two-tiered section is extremely plastic and powerful with broad corner pilaster strips and semi-columns, plain arched windows and narrow slits like loopholes. This section is older than the upper part and was built in 1515. The lower tier was also used as a burial vault, and the upper tier contained a tiny Church, even more toy-like than the one over the Holy Gates. The upper octagon with the belfry and a somewhat heavy tent-shaped spire was added in the seventeenth century and its design differs from that of the lower section. The staircase inside the wall of the lower section originally went even higher which suggests that the Church was also topped by a belfry. This would make it one of the earliest specimens of a stone tent-shaped Church with a belfry on top. There were three large bells and three small chimes in the belfry. In the Northeast outer wall of the second tier there is a niche for another small bell suspended on a wooden beam. This could have been one of the bells which were rung by a rope on ground level as a signal to start the bell-ringing.

North of the Cathedral stands the refectory Church of the Conception, built in 1551 in place of a wooden one and restored by Yevgeniy Arkhipov in 1958.
Like the Cathedral its original appearance was considerably altered. Its main section consists of the spacious square hall of the refectory with a high ceiling and a single pillar. It stands on the first floor of the building. The east wall was adjoined by the smaller rectangular section of the Church proper situated slightly to the south. The present apse was added in the seventeenth century.
The refectory hail is also adjoined on the west side by a building which balances the Church. The extended facade of the whole ensemble looked on to the Convent 's inner courtyard. This facade probably had a flight of steps running along it and leading up to the entrance into the refectory. The lower storey contained a bakery, kitchen and other domestic premises.
The refectory has two features which distinguish it from other Convent buildings: a band of indented red rhombuses on a white background running along the cornice, rarely found in Russian architecture, and an uncommon technique of laying the walls and vaults in small brick. Similar decorative bands are found in Polish architecture. It is quite likely that the refectory Church was designed probably by a Polish architect invited by Yelena Glinskaya or her family.
A clock bell-tower of unusual design was built on to the Southwest corner of the refectory in the sixteenth century. Instead of carrying the usual octagon its high square base is surmounted by an irregular hexagon. This in turn is topped by a smaller hexagon with semi-columns on the corners, rosettes and niches on the surfaces, a belfry with shallow arches and a short tent-shaped spire. The somewhat crude technique of building with large bricks is similar to that of the gateway Church of the Annunciation. It is highly likely that both buildings were the work of local Suzdal architects, who had been used to working in wood and had invested their brick buildings with the spirit and techniques of wooden architecture.