Not far from the Nativity Cathedral, in the west part of the Kremlin , is situated the wooden Church of Saint Nicholas, built in 1766 in the village of Glotovo (the Yuryev-Polskoy district of Vladimir region) and transferred to Suzdal in 1960. It was brought here as one of the first steps to set up an open air museum of Russian wooden architecture in Suzdal.
There are comparatively few surviving specimens of old wooden architecture in central Russia and this building is an excellent specimen of the early type of wooden Church in which the main body is very similar to the basic unit of an ordinary peasant's house. Both consist of simple rectangles built of round logs laid horizontally and interlocking at the corners.
The Church of Saint Nicholas is elevated over a ground storey and surrounded on three sides by a raised gallery. The main, rectangular body of the Church is adjoined on the west side by the somewhat lower building of the refectory (trapeznaya), and on the east side by an altar apse.
The steeply pitched plank roofs and tiny dome with scaly shingles make this small, simple building with its somewhat dumpy lower sections look remarkably slender and imposing. We can see similar designs based on traditional forms going back over the centuries in small seventeenth- and eighteenth-century heated stone Churches in Suzdal. It is showing the close relationship between stone and wooden architecture.
If we were looking north from the ramparts we would see the quiet river Kamenka, now overgrown with sedge, at the foot of the hill on which the town is situated. On the right above the steep slope of the river's left bank there is a group of eighteenth-century Churches: the Church of the Entry into Jerusalem and the Church of Holy Great-Martyr Paraskeva, with the Church of the Resurrection behind them. Further on you can see the Church of Saint Lazarus and the tall bell-tower of the Convent of the Deposition of the Robe with its famous double gateway and two tent-shaped spires. To the left is the solid red and white square tower of the Spaso-Yevfimiev Monastery and the tops of the bell-tower and Church in the Monastery of Saint Alexander. Straight ahead of us in a slight hollow on the right bank are the Churches of the Epiphany and the Nativity with a graceful, tent-shaped bell-tower beside them. Behind them in the distance one can just make out the Convent of the Intercession and the Church of Saint Peter and St Paul. Further west on the top of the right bank is the gloaming white Church of Tikhvin icon of Holy Virgin Mary's which stands on the site of the old Saint Andrew Monastery. All these different buildings give the town a fascinating outline.