I grew up in a place that I consider to be incredibly beautiful. America’s Pacific Northwest is a temperate rainforest between the Pacific and the Cascades filled with mountains, waterfalls, beaches, and old-growth trees, where the landscape remains green and growing all year long. When I travel (which has mostly been in the US), I am accustomed to measuring the beauty of a place by the grandeur of its natural features, comparing a new place to my home. For example, during my first year in Northfield, Minnesota, I was constantly aware of the aspects of the landscape of Minnesota that were different from what I was used to. To the annoyance of all my friends, I moaned and groaned constantly about the extreme weather, starkly delineated seasons, overall flatness, and absence of conifers.

Last weekend our group traveled to Vladimir and Suzdal, our first exploration outside of Moscow. On the train and bus rides, I watched the landscape pass by, and made my usual quick judgement of the aesthetic beauty of this new place. It was very flat and (at this time of year) colorless. If you took away the ancient cities, this area would not look too different from the area around Northfield, which I complained about above. But looking back, my overwhelming impression of Vladimir and Suzdal is that they were incredibly beautiful. Here, I encountered a new type of beauty, one that I have not seen since the last time I was in Europe. Unlike in Oregon or Minnesota, the modern residents of these ancient cities live surrounded by the beauty of old, glorious, manmade architectural creations, a very different daily experience of beauty than mine, which is composed of monumental natural features.

In Portland, the skyline is nice, I guess, but it can hardly compete with the snow capped peaks of Mount Hood and Mount Saint Helens that rise above it. Any Oregonian would probably agree with me that buildings such as our beloved “Big Pink” in downtown can hardly compete with one of our natural wonders, such as Multnomah Falls or Neakhahnie Mountain. These buildings are mostly big rectangles of metal, glass, and concrete, built without reference to the natural world. The natural landscape surrounding Vladimir and Suzdal, however, is both integral to these cities and outshone by the ancient constructed wonders within them. For example, Suzdal’s original fortress was purposefully built in a bend in the river to take advantage of the natural moat, and Vladimir is situated atop a cliff overlooking a river, another natural defense. Suzdal’s bend in the river is just another bend in the river, until you take into account the fact that people maintained a fortress here for a thousand years.

Residents of Vladimir can take a bus and attend service at a the Svyato Bogolyubsky Monastery just a few yards away from the same staircase where Andrey Bogolyubsky was murdered in the 12th century. Compare this to the American West, where I am used to considering structures that manage to be 200 or more years old to be ancient ruins to be revered and preserved as historical museums. Now in Russia, I am getting used to everything being so old that I wasn’t surprised when our tour guide in Suzdal pointed to parts of a church that were built in the 18th or 19th centuries and declared them to be “modern.” Although many have been destroyed, Vladimir and Suzdal are still full of these colorful and intricate monasteries, cathedrals, and bell towers: throughout the centuries, buildings have been added in new styles and reconstructed when they were destroyed. Nevertheless, many are still being used for their original purpose. We visited, for example, the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl in Bogolyubskovo, a UNESCO World Heritage sight. Here, original walls held beautiful modern icons, and alongside the tourists, worshippers were still practicing.

I am glad to have spent time outside of Moscow in these cities of old Russia. I felt a great sense of awe at the beauty, age, and significance of their monuments, and I am happy to report that here on the other side of the planet, like at home, people get to experience truly unique and beautiful sights every day.