Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyina Street

Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyina Street is a compact 14th c. stone church from Novgorod’s republican era, built in 1374 with the austere clarity of the local architectural tradition. Its fame rests on the surviving fresco cycle painted in 1378 by Theophanes the Greek, whose swift, darkly luminous figures—especially in the dome—brought a Byzantine intensity that reshaped Russian religious art. Behind the plain exterior, the interior reads as a meditation in paint, still treated as one of Veliky Novgorod’s defining sacred images.