A study of the history of contacts between Novgorodian architecture and northern Europe in the late thirteenth to fifteenth centuries demonstrates that links in this sphere could hardly be described as constant. We can identify several impulses from outside, stages when western European architecture most strongly affected its early Russian counterpart (the 1290s–1310s and 1430s). This study shows that constructional and decorative elements imported from the architecture of northern Europe overlaid the local architectural tradition in Novgorodian buildings. Within a few decades, some of the new forms became customary, ‘naturalized,’ while others failed to gain the Novgorodians’ acceptance.