For the first time mention the stone buildings of the Archbishop's Chambers near to the Nativity Cathedral in accounts of the great fire of 1577. The extremely complex ensemble, which we can see today, consists of buildings erected between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The oldest section is the Bishop's Palace in the Southeast corner dating back to the late fifteenth century.
The present north wing of the block facing the Cathedral's west portal stands on the site of the former Church of John Theologos built in 1528.
In 1559 the bishop's private chapel was erected to the west of the palace, with a refectory, an attractive Church porch and, something rarely found in the architecture of central Russia, two intersecting double-sloped roofs giving a gable on each of the four sides, similar to those found in Novgorod and Pskov Churches of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
At the end of the seventeenth century the old buildings of the bishop's palace were incorporated into the new, larger Archbishop's Chambers erected for the Suzdal Metropolitan Illarion between 1682 and 1707. The front of the main building with its wide windows decorated with elaborate surrounds faced on to the Cathedral courtyard and was closely linked with the Cathedral, both architecturally and functionally. The main entrance to the palace, crowned by a tiny tent-shaped spire decorated with greenish-turquoise tiles, is situated directly opposite the west portal of the Cathedral. Two broad ceremonial flights of steps lead up to the large vestibule on the first floor through which the visitor passed into a vast hall without pillars, the main reception hall known as the Cross Chamber (Krestovaya Palata). The hall's vaulted ceiling was removed in 1874. The area beyond this chamber was taken up by a number of rooms used for various domestic purposes. The ground floor, also vaulted, was used for storage, and service rooms.
In the eighteenth century the old bishop's refectory Church was joined to the main building of the palace. In order to get an idea of what the palace originally looked like one must imagine it with steep, hip roofs instead of the present flat roof which makes the building look somewhat like a barracks. Alexey Varganov's detailed study and restoration work on the Archbishop's Chambers, completed in 1951, enabled him to reconstruct its original appearance.
Inside the Chambers now is situated an "museum exposition" by "the Vladimir and Suzdal museum-reserve". This exposition consist an original sacred subjects from the Nativity Cathedral. There are: an icons, a books of gospel, a cloths, a bells, a gate... Probably, our society in general and management of the Museum in particular, do not understand disgrace of this fact.
We must also say a word about those sections of the Kremlin ensemble which have not survived. The bell-tower was originally linked with the second floor of the palace by a gallery supported by brick pillars. All that remains of this passage today is the portal on the southeast corner of the Chambers. The gallery bent around the west and north sides of the bell-tower and led to the Metropolitan's small private Chapel of the Annunciation, erected next to the tower. A tall porch decorated with niches and tiles ran from the gallery to the courtyard below directly opposite the south portal of the Cathedral. Thus the seventeenth-century architects were constantly concerned to link their buildings with the old Cathedral, seeing them as parts of a single, harmonious whole. The system of connecting separate buildings by means of galleries and passages raised on pillars is typical of early Russian domestic architecture, as we can see in the twelfth-century palace at Bogolyubovo.