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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…

While I was taking photos of houses and their window frames throughout Russia, it had dawned on me that some of them, those on government duty, can form quite a curious collection. , had been already presented here.— Registry office in Rostov, post office in Alapayevsk,, and police station in Moscow.

This perfect sample of wooden architecture traditional in Ivanovo Oblast houses a Disinfection Department of Sanitary and Epidemiology Inspectorate of the town of Kineshma!

Sometimes (in one out of ten towns) one can discover a wooden house totally different of all the local ones! Just look at this nice and bright one waiting for me in Yuryev-Polsaky, Vladimir Oblast!

Life is much more cheerful here, I am sure!

It is widely known that window frames decorated with relief carving had been very popular before saw-through decoration came in use. The transition was slow and gradual: slit carving had been a kind of parent to saw-through one. It had rather modest looks, and, in addition, took much longer time to make, –  the reason why other types of carvings almost replaced it. But Alapayevsk (Sverdlovsk Oblast) has kept some window frames decorated in this technique.

I am not very sure this window had been made in early XIX century but its style seems to be of that  period.

Five or six years ago I took photos of window frames in Kovrov, the very first town of Vladimir Oblast I had included in my collection.

Now. when I had visited almost every corner of it, I realize this place is one of the richest in terms of window frames.

Vyazniki, a town very close to Kovrov and Suzdal, tourists’ favorite, just pale in comparison as they cannot offer neither the intricacy nor the number of window frames I had admired in Kovrov.

Many of you, and (to tell the truth) me, too, prefer the old window frames and, subconsciously, refuse modern ones in being entitled “traditional”. And yes, sad truth is that the majority of things done in wooden architecture during the last decades of the XXth century and in our days, is a far cry from the century’s old best samples, both in terms of quality and of that subtle and immeasurable described usually as just a beauty.

Yet when I was in Suzdal I had discovered we, too, have something to keep for our offsprings. We certainly should not be ashamed of window frames like this one!