Plock doors
The doors were intended for the cathedral in Plock. They were more than 3.5 m high and almost 2.5 m wide, made of bronze by Magdeburg's Louismans between 1152 and 1156, and decorated with richly ornamented carving with 26 quatrefoils depicting 48 scenes related to the Catholic Church. Their creators were the masters Riquin and Waismuth, whose figures are described in Latin, and Avram, depicted as a figure with luddite attributes, signed in Cyrillic. The artists were associated with the court of the Bishop of Magdeburg. At the time, the city was one of the best casting centres in Europe.

Doors in Novgorod
The doors currently adorn the main entrance of the western portal of the Cathedral of the Divine Wisdom in Novgorod. They were first recorded there in the 1430s. The exquisite artistic class, the extremely elaborate and well-thought-out iconographic and ideological programme on the door certainly testify to the high level of culture of the Vistula River town. Over the hundreds of years of the door's existence in Novgorod, its individual scenes were several times dismantled, supplemented, and additionally described in Cyrillic script, so that the awareness of the message and the original layout of the decoration was lost. Nevertheless, being aware of the value of the object, care was taken and efforts were made to keep it in a good state of preservation.

From the 19th century onwards, the door was repeatedly studied and entered scholarly circulation under various names, as Magdeburg, Novgorod, Korsun, Sigtun and, relatively least frequently, Plock. In the interwar period, the Poles reportedly thought of buying them from the Soviet authorities. However, the transaction did not take place. It is only thanks to the efforts of the Płock Scientific Society that a copy of this masterpiece can be admired in the Płock Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary since 1982. At the same time, Rev. Prof. Ryszard Knapiński reconstructed the original layout of the quatrefoils and scenes. He noticed that the unifying thread in most of the quatrefoils is the theme of Credo Apostolorum. This shows that originally the panels were used by the Church to teach the faithful the truths of the faith, as they depicted in an extremely attractive form representations relating to the points of the Catholic Creed.

The explanation as to why almost 1150 km separate the original and the present location of the Plock Doors has been dealt with by many scholars. According to researchers, there are several hypotheses of the door's translocation from Plock Cathedral. Most likely, in 1262, the army led by Lithuanian Grand Duke Mindaugas looted the door during a battle with Mazovian Duke Siemowit I. A sensational hypothesis was recently put forward by Dr Robert Kunkel. He sees the Plock Doors as a generous gift from Archbishop Wichmann von Seeburg of Magdeburg to the Bishopric of Plock. However, the researcher supposes that the door did not appear in the stronghold of the Mazovian princes at all. Another explanation, unsupported by concrete arguments, is the presumption of a princely gift to the Novgorod Republic being in political relations with the Polish Crown.