Month: November 2013

I’ve never seen so beautiful nalichniki decorated with plants like in Kostromaи!

A museum of town life in Ugligh, Yaroslavl Oblast, occupies a wonderful wooden house. Yet I could not find it there. I have no idea of its location, though, when we were there, we had travelled the length and the breadth of the place.

But then, the town is full of the most intricate window frames which can make other places green with jealousy!

All the window frames throughout Russia have one thing in common, irrespective to the year or the century they had been made. Even the place and the region are of no importance, be it Khabarovsk or Petrozavodsk.

This thing is that window frames of the same windows must follow some uniform pattern. Which means, if the windows of the house are all similar, their window frames will be similar, too. Yet if one of them is different, (i.e. at the verandah), its window frame may be absolutely different, too.

Of course, there are no rules without exception: say, in Omsk, where windows at the ground and the first floor are the same, the first ones may have shutters, while the second ones usually do not.

But three similar windows with three different frames? It breaks all the rules !!!

But then, what else can we expect of the art nouveau…

The photo is from Vyazniki, Vladimir Oblast

This unpainted window frame is mostly unusual for Omsk – most of them have two -color painting there.

A local who had been passing by and saw me taking its photo flung that the window frame was certainly not bad, but it would be good for it to be painted; otherwise the house had desolated looks.

It should be mentioned that I had come from Tomsk, where people almost never paint their window frames, and that was why I saw painting as something vulgar, a kind of an unavoidable evil, though Tomsk had proved that was not the common rule.

Since then, I have travelled to almost seventy places. Yet it still puzzles me why they do not paint their houses and window frames in Tomsk, whereas everything in painted in neighbouring Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Kemerovo…

I planned to post this photo when the heat would come back, but the summer is almost over, no heat seems to be on the horizon, and very nice windows with shutters and icicles are going to disappear in vain! They could have waited for the next summer to come, but I fell ill with high temperature so now I cannot dreaming of anything else but to cool down :) Don’t you even think of falling ill, my friends!

By the way, I found this window in Tyumen. Please believe me – cold was really bitter there!

What is the best decoration for a traditional small wooden house? Its window frames, for sure! And what is the best decoration for a window frame? Its cat, for sure:))) Like this one decorating the most traditional window frame in Shuya!

My thorough search has found this outstanding house having 26 framed windows at its first floor! May be its only rival, in terms of window frames at the façade, stands in Tomsk; that one also has 26 window frames. Yet they are positioned in two rows, 13 at the ground floor and 15 at the first one, and here the row is just one! In addition, there are three more window frames at the attic! So, this house in Spas-Klepiki has 29 window frames in total, which makes an absolute record!

Before my travel to Ryazan Oblast I had imagined a house with an attic should be small and comfortable. There, in Spas-Klepiki, I discovered a wooden house with an attic decorated with window frames, whose size can beat not any other attic but the whole building!

To tell you the truth, the attic makes the second floor and not the first one, as it may seem!

At its first floor, this striking wooden palace has either 24 or 25 decorated windows placed in one row along its facade!

I think this is the longest wooden house I have ever seen in Russia

A tradition of putting statues of animals on the houses roofs can be traced since very old times, when there was a custom to sacrifice an animal before the house would be built.

Many nations knew this custom and as late as in the mid-XX century it was still echoed in the Europe.

The Slavs used to sacrifice a horse, or, more often, a cock; in later times, their figures crowned many  roofs; that “sacrifice to a house” was to protect its inhabitants from death, as a popular belief was that someone would certainly die in a newly-built house.

Some European nations used to sacrifice human beings, kids most often, before a building of something huge, like a fortress or a bridge.

One of the explanations for such a bloodthirstiness was that the builders of old times believed that the blood of the sacrifice would redeem their fault to the spirits of trees cut to make a house. In later times, the belief of a sacrifice to be made to any kind of building had covered stone houses as well.

Whatever it was, my sincere hope is that not a dog had suffered during the building of this most unusual wooden house in Klin, near Moscow!

Things desolated and forlorn often cast gloom. Yet my heart just sinks when it comes to wooden houses.  How could it happen? For tens of years people were living here, walking, sleeping and taking meals, going to work, having kids who, first in their prams and later on their feet were making rounds about that house.

Then some unimaginable force caused them all to leave this native, feel-at-home place…

It was about six years ago when, in Kazan, I had photographed this art nouveau wooden house. Has it survived? I’m afraid not: it stood in the very center of the city…