"Letters 1000 Years Old" tells the story of a vital medieval Russian city in the words of those who lived there. Love notes, business transactions, and even a child's surprisingly familiar drawings and repetition of the alphabet were written on birchbark and preserved in layers of dirt underneath the city of Novgorod. These letters, available here in bulk for the first time in English translation, shed new light on medieval Russian literacy - including the ability of non-noble women to write in the 11th-14th centuries. The book features a concise review of the rise and fall of the Novgorod Republic - a state whose literacy disappeared together with its wealth in the 15th century.