The marketplace started at the Great Bridge, which connected it with the Kremlin. A long line of the piers with the docked ships stretched along the banks. Shops at the Marketplace lined into long rows. On the whole in the XVI century, there were 42 shop-rows, and each of them focusing on a particular kind of goods: bread, fish, leather, silver, icons and many others. Houses of the Hanseatic merchants who came to trade with the whole Novgorod Rus were located nearby. In the place where the Rossiya hotel is now situated there used to be the Goth merchants’ house, the German merchants’ house stood opposite the Church of Assumption on the Marketplace.
As the Hanseatic League was founded, the houses were united into the single Hanseatic Association. For several centuries, Novgorod, the leading trading partner of the Hanseatic League, competed with the largest trading points of Europe and Asia. Foreign merchants made really good deals here, buying wax, honey, fur, skin, walrus tusk.
The close-packed territory of the Yaroslav's Court boasts religious and civil architecture monuments of XII-XVIII centuries. Where else can one see the large Prince’s temple of the XII century, and small merchants’ churches that were used not only as a place for prayer, but also as warehouses for storing goods side by side... There stands the Gate tower of Gostiny Dvor, as well as the arcade – civil architecture construction left from the stone Gostiny Dvor, built here in the days of Peter the Great.