3 / 56
BCD SPECIAL REPORT ON
HISTORIC CHURCHES
22
ND ANNUAL EDITION
3
brought more wealth to the region. All
this changed, however, with the building
of St Petersburg by Peter the Great. With
a port that remained ice-free for ten
months of the year, St Petersburg became
the window to the west and northern
Russia became increasingly isolated and
sank into obscurity.
During the mid to late 19th and
early 20th centuries there was a revival
of interest in the north, this time
ethnographic rather than economic.
Leading historians, musicologists, artists
and architects travelled to the north.
While working as an ethnographer
in 1889, the artist Vasily Kandinsky
described the peasants as ‘so brightly
and colourfully dressed that they seemed
like moving, two legged pictures’. In
1904 the artist Ivan Bilibin wrote of the
bell tower at Tsyvozero, ‘she is living her
last days, she has leant over sideways
and trembles in the wind. The bells have
been taken from her’ (110 years later she
is still hanging on). The painter Vasily
Vereshchagin complains, in 1894, of the
neglect of the churches by the local clergy:
I wish they had even a brief course
in the fine arts at the seminaries. If
priests who have responsibility for
the old churches do not show mercy
and unceremoniously demolish
them, what can we expect from
the semi-literate country fathers.
They are ready to sacrifice every
ancient wooden church for a gaudy
new stone church, embellished with
manneristic golden baubles.
If the custody of the wooden churches
by the priesthood was shoddy, their
custody by the local Soviets after the
revolution was catastrophic. The artist
Ivan Grabar and the architect and
preservationist Pyotr Baranovsky joined
the campaign to save the northern
wooden architecture. In 1921 Baranovsky
undertook the first of ten expeditions
to the north to study its architecture:
In the villages on the banks of the
Pinega there were so many churches
that were ‘extremely miraculous’ that
I decided that come what may, I would
go up the river to its very source.
You arrive in a village and there
are two or three tent-roofed church
beauties, three-storey wooden houses,
mill‑strongholds – and all of them
first-class architectural masterpieces…
I don’t know anything more miraculous
than Russian wooden architecture!...
It is hard to acknowledge the fact that
the descendants of those who raised
this miracle with their calloused
hands, destroyed the glory of their
great-great grandfather’s father.
And destroyed they were, no wooden
church survives on the Pinega river today.
Those that did survive in the north were
used by the local Soviets as warehouses,
grain stores, clubs, garages, dance halls
and cinemas. Most were left to rot.
After the ‘Great Patriotic War’
against Nazi Germany and its allies,
during which God had been reinstated
by Stalin to fight on the side of Holy
Russia, there was an effort to restore
the wooden churches that had
survived. They were recognised as a
great symbol of Russian culture, the
culture that the Russian people had
been fighting desperately to preserve.
In 1948 the architect Alexander
Opolovnikov (1911–1994) supervised the
restoration of the wooden Church of
the Assumption at Kondopoga. With his
team and later with his daughter Elena
(1943–2011) Opolovnikov restored over
60 monuments of wooden architecture
and much of what we see today, including
the churches at Kizhi and the Cathedral of
the Assumption at Kem, survives thanks
to them. Opolovnikov also produced
technical drawings of the churches and of
their construction details that are great
works of art.
With the break-up of the Soviet
Union, funds disappeared and most
restoration came to a halt.
STOPPING THE ROT
The first wooden church I visited, in
2002, was the 43-metre high Church of
St Dimitrius of Thessalonica at Verknaya
Uftiuga. I later learned that Alexander
Popov, a student of Opolovnikov, and his
team had spent seven years from 1981
to 1988 restoring St Dimitrius. They had
completely dismantled the church, rotten
timbers (15% of the whole) were replaced
and then the building was reassembled
log by log. The logs were up to 12 metres
long and some weighed as much as two
tons. Popov, like Opolovnikov, is very
rigorous in his research and methods and
at Verknaya Uftiuga he experimented
with the local blacksmith to produce
carpenters’ axes based on sketches of axe
heads found by archaeologists in Siberia.
He was keen to use the same techniques
and tools as the builders of 1784.
In 2011 I asked Mikhail Milchik,
vice director of the St Petersburg
Research Institute of Restoration and
a great expert on Russian wooden
architecture, to write an afterword to
Wooden Churches: Travelling in the
Russian North
. He was not optimistic,
his first sentence read, ‘Wooden
Architecture, the most original and most
unique part of the cultural heritage of
Russia, is on the verge of extinction’.
Almost four years on I’m slightly
Church of St Dimitrius of Thessalonica (1784), Verknaya Uftiuga, Krasnoborsk district, Archangel region