Month: September 2013

When I’ve wrote about animals and birds, that usually adorn wooden windows frames, I thought that it’s only one animal that really adorn nalichniki (and also all houses)!

Of course I’m talking about cats! :)
I’m always happy to find that decoration under or on a roof.
This for instance – from Kalyazin city, Tver area!

 

Many books on wooden houses carving assure a pattern showing some mythical creatures occur very often at the top of window frames.

Frankly speaking, it seems very strange to me. Yes, so far I have not visited Nizhny Novgorod Oblast said to be a Klondike of these creatures, but I have already some thousands of photos taken in many places of Russia.

I can tell you that, except from dragons and snakes, the only truly strange living things decorating tops of window frames were these six-winged birds I had found in Kazan. I do not mean to say the authors of these books are liars. What I do mean that if you ever happen to see some pattern of a living thing, take its photo, please! Because it is a genuine rarity and a huge luck!

Seems like more than a hundred times I had heard of Uglich as of a treasure island in terms of window frames; go there, I was told over and over again. My excuse was I had been there in 2007, but was so short of time that could not make any photos. Then, we just lunched and left the place.

Yet when I got there this spring, I realized why they had been so insisting: wooden houses are just something! This is one of them, pleasing the eye with its lavish decoration

 

Enjoy these laced window frames from Shuya!

Many years ago, deep in Soviet Union times, when I worked in The Soviet Life magazine the USSR published in exchange of America magazine, I was assigned to Vilnius, the capital of the Soviet Lithuania, to do an interview with an architect who had won a Lenin Prize for the designing of residential area called Lazdinai. If my memory is not at fault, his surname was Chekanauskas. If you ever visited Vilnius, you should be familiar with its old city whose many houses were built in XV – XVI centuries. At those early days, living in that beauty had been a far cry from comfort: they did not have any sewerage system, flats were tiny and hardly ever refurbished. When a decision came to tidy them up, it was a challenge almost impossible to face: streets are so narrow that construction machinery just could not squeeze there, each brick was to be removed by hands, and workers had been paid three roubles per one, the sum unheard of in those days. A “provocative” question came to my mind, and it did not take me long to ask:

-Why you waste so much money and effort to reconstruct all these old buildings? Why not just demolish them and build new and modern ones?

Obviously shocked Chekanauskas looked back at me and replied:

-Both these houses and the whole of the old city are exceptionally beautiful, and a person born in beauty and living in beauty is not the same as a person living around ugly modern and featureless structures.

Vladimir Pozner. Tour de France, Travelling in France with Ivan Urgant

This carved wooden miracle stands in Kostroma

Today I’m going in Vladimir city with creators of architectural park “Russian world” (maybe it isn’t final name). On the way we drove to Pereslavl where I had found an administration in villa XIX century!

Some days ago I did an interview for Russian TV and mentioned that Tomsk. has one of the most gorgeous and the most intricate window frames.

For a long time, I have been using my own classification based on the intricacy, and yet so far I have not found anything more eye-catching.

This amazing blue house stands in Shatzk, Ryazan Oblast.

Tall double-pitch roof and fairly short columns make it absolutely unusual for this region. For several minutes, I was walking around it searching for an angle from where neither power line pillows nor gas pipe could be seen. Certainly they were installed by some unknown genius, as you can see them from any point.

Russian magazine “Dekorativnoe iskusstvo” that had been published in Soviet Union since 1957 to 1993 years, and that resumed publishing in 2011 year – has it’s new summer issue (the magazine publish once in a season) with my photos of wooden nalichniki!

For this magazine I’ve made a big photo collage with colorfull nalichniki from various Russian region – and this is result!

This publication also has an article with illustrations about ours museum of nalichniki :)
So if you know Russian, I’ll recomend this for you!

Nerchinsk is the most remote place where I have taken my photos. Its houses are fairly low, with windows almost touching the ground, but their frames are very stylish!