Month: March 2014

I congratulate everybody with the day of national unity!
I wish you strength and will-power to fight with difficulties, I wish you to grow in wisdom!

At this holyday I want to share with you with something nice. Here a magazine “Vokrug sveta” publish a small article with photo of nalichniki from nine citys!
I hope it would inspire people to not throw away their window frames

Irkutsk city’ve saved a lot of wooden houses, and most of them are incredible beautifull, front of houses and it’s nalichniki decorated with solid carving. There in Irkutsk you soon got used to it’s beauty.
It’s a pity that almost all window frames are covered with dust. We could show our wooden treasures to the tourists.

You know nalichniki is rarely painted more than two colours, and almost in every window frame one in that “colour pair” is white.
Maybe the most many-coloured nalichniki are in Myshkin city: people painted their window framed with four or five colour.
Also you can find multicoloured nalichnik like this in Rybinsk city, so enjoy! Don’t you see anything strange in window?:)

Lastyear, 2012, thegreat book came out of print. I consider Wooden Architecture of the Urals to be one of the best on this subject. If only anything like this would be made for all the regions laying between the Sea of Japan and the Danube, the world would be much richer! It unfolds the history of the wooden architecture of the Urals, layouts of buildings at the peasants’ yards of XVIII century, explains the purpose of the frieze, how wooden houses are transformed to museums’ property etc….you name it.

Enjoy this Firebird house from Tomsk! Yes, the photo shows only its triple (!) window frame:  when three years ago I was in Tomsk, it had been under restoration. Now it looks like new. When I dug the photo up, it struck me if that frame was original or made later? Just some days ago I received a scan of the Soviet postcard showing that very house:

the angle is quite different, but the triple window is there

In my trips through the Vladimir Oblast, I noticed that roofs at many houses have this shape. This stocky house which, I can bet, is more than a century old is from the town of Yuriev-Polsky. This type of roof, though may occur in other regions, is yet rare.

In Russia, where beautiful wooden houses of the XIX century are still rather frequent, many territories are just open-air museums concentrating all the styles and patterns peculiar for the place.

This window frame is a part a wooden house built in 1873 by Ye. Zirinov, a carpenter, for A.Serov, a wealthy peasant. It stood in the village of Mytishchi, Makariev District, Kostroma Oblast and later has been brought to THE Kostroma museum of wooden architecture, where still pleases the visitors’ eyes

This carving hints the house has been built circa 1960s. Its neat look proves the owners appreciate its beauty. It stands in the Gavrilov Posad, Ivanovo Oblast

Industrialization of the Soviet Union period brought a lot of harm to the wooden architecture. Yet there are a lot of eclectics in the world, which explains why Soviet symbols  – stars, hammer and sickle, you name it – are rather popular patterns for the window frames made in the XX century. Perfect example is this one from Kashin, Tver Oblast: a combination of very oldcock pattern and Soviet symbols.