The Church of the Intercession on the Nerl is built

The church is a cross-in-square building of white limestone with four piers and a single dome; its walls are covered with carved reliefs, among them figures of King David. It stands on an artificial hill about three metres high in the floodplain, and when the meadows flood in spring it seems to float on the water. Excavations in 1954–1955 showed that it was once surrounded by galleries. Since 1992 it has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site ‘White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal’.

Its date is disputed. The chronicles only say that Andrei built two stone churches of the Mother of God at Bogolyubovo. The Life of Prince Andrei, a text of 1702, relates that he raised this church in a single season in memory of his son Izyaslav, who died in 1165 of wounds received in the campaign against the Volga Bulgars; on this basis N. N. Voronin dated it to 1165, P. A. Rappoport to 1165–1167 and Vasily Dobrokhotov to 1166. The chronicles, however, do not connect the church with Izyaslav — the link first appears in the 16th century — and the Suzdal chronicle says that Andrei’s retinue came back from the campaign of 1164 unharmed. A 16th-century Vladimir chronicler records under 1158 that Andrei, having fortified Bogolyubovo, built there the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God and another, of the Intercession, on the Nerl, and S. V. Zagraevsky and Tatyana Timofeeva accept 1158; some earlier scholars thought the church contemporary with the Dormition Cathedral in Vladimir, or even later.

In 1784 the abbot of the Bogolyubovo monastery obtained permission to pull the church down for building material for a bell tower, but the plan was abandoned for lack of money; in 1803 an onion dome was placed over the old stone one.