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4
BCD SPECIAL REPORT ON
HISTORIC CHURCHES
22
ND ANNUAL EDITION
more confident of its survival (I hope
Mikhail is as well). I have one or two
reasons for believing this. Firstly,
I am very impressed by the grassroots
organisations that have been set up to
record what has survived and other
organisations that have been established,
often on a very local scale, to do what
they can to literally stop the rot. Water
ingress is the main enemy of wooden
buildings. When the joints are rotten,
collapse is imminent. Local people have
taken it upon themselves to repair the
roofs of their churches and bell towers,
to shutter windows and to clear out the
detritus of years of neglect.
The organisation
Obscheye Delo
(Common Cause) was founded by
Moscow priest Father Alexei, who
spends his summers at Vorzogory on the
White Sea with his family. He explains:
When we first came here we
suddenly heard the unexpected
sound of an axe splitting wood by
the abandoned bell tower. It was
Grandpa Sasha, for years he had
been patching and repairing the
tower – he simply couldn’t bear
the thought of it one day collapsing
before his eyes. We were so inspired
by his example, that we immediately
offered our help and now, every
summer, we work to restore the
ancient temples of Vorzogory.
Obscheye Delo
has set itself the task of
saving the wooden churches of northern
Russia. Each summer its members, now
in their hundreds, patch leaky roofs,
prop up walls, clear undergrowth and dig
trenches to act as firebreaks. Professional
restorers will take their place in time but
many of the churches and chapels being
patched up by volunteers are having their
lives extended for a few more years.
Money has been made available
from private and public sources to
restore churches. Alexander Popov
is now working on restoration of the
early 18th-century Church of the Saints
Cosmo and Damian, near Lezhdam
in the Vologda region. It had been
Church of the Transfiguration (1781), bell tower (1793), Turchasovo, Onega district, Archangel region