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During this period Novgorod's architecture
underwent innovations that were clearly different from the traditional
approaches of Byzantium and Kiev. But the benefactors, though, were no longer
the same, and instead of princes we now see boyars, high clergymen, merchants,
craftsmen, individuals or their associations, and in certain cases simple
citizens of a street or neighborhood who erect new churches. It is true they
are tall, not so luxurious as before, single apsed, and almost square in shape,
with four inside piers supporting a single cupola, and they reveal certain
elements borrowed from Romanesque architecture. The usual pilasters that
reflect inside partition are absent in most cases and the shape of the cupolas
changed from the more flat Byzantine type or the helmet-shaped to the more
fastidiously tasteful but vulgarly named onion-shaped cupola that would soon
become popular throughout the country. These small churches were mostly built
of stone with very limited if any use of bricks, and the roofing system was
also changed. The whiteness and the surface of the unevenly cut stone blocks
used in building the roofs, as was the case with Saint Sophia and some other
Novgorod churches, gave them that peculiar elastic form which suggests that
they were sculptured.
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