Northern Wood

Just before sunset, a large, modern bus stopped in the quiet village of Saminsky Pogost. About three dozen women (along with a nun and several men) stepped out onto the dusty, sandy road.

This was not a group of pilgrims. They looked a bit more like tourists and were traveling from Vologda to the shores of the White Sea to visit the Solovetsky Islands. This small village on the border of Vologda Oblast and the Republic of Karelia simply happened to be the approximate halfway point of their thousand-kilometer journey, and they had decided to make a short stop to see the ancient wooden Church of the Prophet Elijah.

Built at the end of the seventeenth century, and currently in a semi-catastrophic state of repair, the church is similar to the famous Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin in Kondopoga, which was destroyed by arson in August 2018.

The group was in luck. The church’s caretaker, Nikolai – bearing a grey beard and a set of keys – was nearby.

The group stepped inside, where just a single window, from which Nikolai removed a wooden shutter, illuminated the darkened interior.

Suddenly, from the quiet depths of the assembled group, a lone voice rang out: “Why are we wasting time on this ruin?”

The voice belonged to a pleasant-looking, well-dressed woman standing in the front row. She radiated an air of tense dissatisfaction.

The caretaker began to recount the church’s history, even though no one had asked him to. He also spoke of the village’s collapsed Tikhvin Church: volunteers had not been successful saving it, only in rescuing its cupolas from a debris pile.

“The bell tower stood here,” Nikolai continued. “But an old woman wrote a declaration to the village council, saying she feared that the tower would collapse and fall on her izba. That was all that the local Soviet officials needed. Based on her statement, they set to work and demolished the three-hundred-year-old structure. The old woman later became physically twisted into something unrecognizable. She was a hunchback for the rest of her days,” the storyteller added with no evident malice.

After the short excursion, the group and I parted ways. They went back to their bus; I went down to the river.

Yet I had not gotten very far when I heard a scraping, as if metal sheets were hacking away at one another. The sparkling new bus screeched to a halt after driving just thirty meters. The driver got out for an inspection and stunned the passengers by informing them that the clutch had almost completely given out and they would have to wait seven or perhaps up to ten hours for a replacement to arrive from Vologda.

The tourists exited the bus. After some thought, a few descended to the wooden bridge over the river, while several others sat or even lay down on the old wooden steps of the Church of Elijah. The sun had already set, and a cold, northern night lay ahead. It was as if some mystical hand had forced them to stay overnight in this small place.

The wooden architecture of the Russian North is a stark example of the collision of time, the elements, and human will. The financial turmoil at the turn of the twenty-first century and a decline in birth rates led to an exodus from the country to the city, as a result of which thousands of villages emptied out. As they say in Russia, they simply died off.

Countless izbas, each of which is entirely unique, were abandoned, to be buffeted by wind and snowstorms. But the real catastrophe of the post-Soviet era was the decay and loss of hundreds of examples of wooden church architecture. Neither religious nor secular authorities needed the chapels and churches of all sizes that sat amid depopulated or underpopulated villages. Tourists for the most part were rare or random. And those that have found themselves in surviving churches rarely appreciate what they are seeing, hurrying as they are to their next destination.

I set out to travel around the Russian North, keenly aware of the need to make haste if I wanted to see remote villages and towns that, in just a few years, will look nothing like what they do today. Not only is a generation with unique knowledge departing – those born and raised in the most difficult decades of the twentieth century – but their homes are being ravaged by time. Often entire landscapes and natural landmarks are being wiped from the map.

And yet I also found people whose ache for their native culture and their desire to preserve it turns them into saviors of these darkened, cracked pearls of wooden artistry. Hundreds of people go to the North every summer to take part in restoration work and emergency operations. Some, after arriving for the first time, choose to leave city life behind and move into ancient wooden izbas, making woodworking their life’s work.

They jokingly call themselves “black restorers.”* Black in the sense that they are self-supporting, independent, and they do not act on anyone’s instructions. They simply understand that their work is needed right now, and they don’t have time to wait for permits. On prospecting trips I took with them, I learned that, if we delay for not years but just months, it may be impossible to save some of these monuments. A big snowfall, a storm, or a hard rain could easily destroy something that has stood for centuries.

The fog in Arkhangelsk Oblast can be so thick that people use the word “milk” to describe it. In the midst of such milk, Alexander Matyukhin scythes the grass about his home, then around the massive, wooden Sretensky Church. Very close by is an even older church, named for the Archangel Michael (1715). The church is the source of the village’s name: Arkhangelo.

Matyukhin came to the North many years ago with a group of restorers, then moved here with his family.

“Kargopolye, where we are now, has always traded in grain. But nowadays they tell everyone that it’s not profitable. That, basically, it’s unprofitable to work at all.” Matyukhin explains, the scythe never leaving his hand. “Look what grandiose churches they built. Meanwhile the way they lived… their izbas were heated until they were black, smoke filling them. All of the best things they gave to the church, but now it is all the other way round.”

Matyukhin rolls a cart across the dewy grass toward a small sheep paddock with sheep that stands next to his workshop.

“I just mowed a bit, all the rest is weeds. The locals only cut the grass around their homes with a modern lawnmower,” Matyukhin says without malice or judgment, pointing to the space around the ancient monuments.

After training to be a restorer, Matyukhin attached himself to a group restoring a northern church. And, as he himself admits, during his first trip he began to eye the villages carefully, planning his move. “Today it’s kind of popular – both among tourist and volunteers – to say, ‘I don’t go back to the same place twice; that’s not interesting for me.’ But I’m the sort of person… As soon as I saw this place, I started to think how I could stay here and bring something back to life.”

His bold words about revival bore fruit through the birth of two children; the construction of a new wooden church through donated funds; conservation work in the old Archangel Michael Church; and participation in and leadership of many expeditions. And his work continues: collaborating with the volunteers from the Verenitsa Fund, a chapel in the village of Zabivkino is being restored. And the Arkhangelo (named for the village) artel decided to build a rural cultural center, but not the usual sort. This one is in an ore hut: large, and heated to blackening.* And, significantly, it was not built from scratch, but purchased and moved there from a depopulated  village, where it stood empty and had been consigned to destruction.

Just before dusk we drive to Trinity Church, in the village of the same name. It was built as a united-faith church, meaning it served as the house of worship for both Old Believers, who were numerous here, and the Nikonians.^† In Soviet times it was a club, and even today it does not serve as a church. It is quite simply dangerous to walk around inside; the bearing walls are clearly unstable.

We nonetheless climb the flimsy stairs to reach the base of the bell tower. The log walls give off a sonorous knocking sound. They are rotted from within. You can literally stick your hands into some of them. Obviously, the church would need to be completely taken apart so that entire logs could be replaced.

The grass surrounding the church has not been mowed for a long time. It rises above the lower rows of logs and conceals large, nineteenth century gravestones. A local woman, Natalia, sweeps out the modest interior, which looks a bit like a poor izba. She promises that, if work gets underway, she will feed the volunteers.

“The church is disintegrating before our eyes, but people don’t understand what can be done,” Matyukhin says, looking over the exterior. “It’s important we do not to let slip by that point in time when the locals are willing to get to work. It never occurred to us before that we could raise a little bit of money and at least patch up the holes in the roof.”

Indeed, many people are surprised to learn that there are hundreds of wooden churches and chapels in Arkhangelsk and Vologda oblasts, and in Karelia. They are no longer places of religious activity, but they are also not museums. In fact, according to the Ministry of Culture, there are some 7,500 historically important specimens of wooden architecture in Russia. About 500 of these are churches.

Yet even being a “monument under state protection” is often merely symbolic, says Andrei Bode, an expert in wooden architecture. “There aren’t many monuments protected on the federal level. The government provides rather modest funds for them, enough to do 2-3 large restorations of wooden churches in the North per year,” he says.

Churches with merely regional protective status receive no money at all, Bode says.

“There are a dozen buildings with federal protection that are in critical condition, churches in need of immediate work. Among regional monuments, probably a hundred or two hundred.”

The phenomenon of volunteers working on restoration, he says, “shows that the state is unable to protect its heritage. That people are taking up the functions of the state. It’s an absurd situation.”

Absurd or not, it is certainly not financial gain that attracts urban dwellers to restoration life in rural Russia.

Nadezhda Sokolova has been bouncing among church logs and boards since she was a child. The daughter of Dmitry Sokolov, a pioneer in restoration of the North’s lost and unknown architectural monuments, she, a Muscovite, met a young fellow from Belgorod, Sasha Saprykin, while on an expedition to save a church.

Sokolova is unusually frank: “I did not participate in the restoration work directly; I cooked the meals for those who did. And do you know what my impulse was in recent years, during the last three seasons? Love. The first summer, Sasha and I met while we were restoring a church in the village of Chasovenskaya. And then I went on another expedition because of him. Perhaps one finds enough strength to cook three meals a day for an artel of eighteen people only when one of them is the man you love.”

And then the young lovers bought an izba not far from Arkhangelo. Sasha works in the artel; Nadya raises their baby son, Yura.

They live their daily life with no intention of changing the external appearance of their early-twentieth century home. At the same time, however, many of their neighbors either try to get rid of such ancient homes or cover them up with siding or corrugated metal, and upgrade the original windows with double-glazed units.

We are driving to the prospecting site, where restoration work may begin next year. There is no automobile road across the Onega River to the village of Berezhnaya Dubrova, so we cross the river by boat, fighting the fast current with our oars. Behind the poplars rises the Kizhi of the Onega: the nearly four-hundred-year-old, four-cupola Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is far from any tourist route, is not praised in guidebooks, and rain pours in on its altar through the holes in its moss-covered roof.

We walk beneath the “heavens,”* icons painted directly on the vaults, and climb beneath the roof, illuminating the gaps with our headlamps. Sasha Saprykin is heading the assessment team and answers my question while literally suspended above the altar:

“What is unique about this church? Well there is nothing else like it on the planet. The roof will finish rotting, the walls will collapse, and then it will cease to exist. We need a comprehensive restoration. And yet we are just preparing to take the first step.”

Crossing the river again, we go to the village of Chasovenskaya. Carrying a child in their arms, Sasha and Nadya walk along a very unusual street. The village is not simply dead, the deserted buildings, as well as their rooms and stoves and homemade cabinets, are exposed to the wind and the rain. The façades of some of the early-twentieth-century izbas have been sawn off by neighbors to use as firewood. And what especially upsets Sasha and Nadya is that the wood thieves for some reason took apart the most unique homes, the ones on which the owners memorialized their names and the years their homes were built in murals, colorful ornaments, and elaborate wood carvings: 1909, 1912…

Among the Arkhangelo artel artisans there is a member nicknamed “The German” who is not here for the first time, but who has a grand dream. When he was a teenager, Nikita and his parents left Russia for Germany, where he attended school and then a special music high school. And then suddenly he was swept up by the idea of building his own home. “After reading about Russian wooden architecture,” he says, “I immediately stopped torturing myself with thoughts of building with concrete. After all, everything used to be made with wood.”

Once in Russia, Nikita started hitchhiking around Moscow, looking for land on which to build a home. And it was not far along this path that he realized that he first needed to learn how to build. And who better to teach him how to work with wood than restorers?

So Nikita found himself on an expedition that was working on a chapel in the tiny village of Syuma, in the depths of Arkhangelsk Oblast. And there he met Sasha Matyukhin.

“I joined in on the restoration and realized that I wanted to take something ancient and restore it from beginning to end,” Nikita says.

This summer, Nikita bought a home on the banks of the Onega, alongside his artel colleagues. It was built in 1920, and he paid R40,000 ($640) for the house. He calls it a monument and plans to settle here permanently.

Standing in the middle of his izba, Nikita talks enthusiastically about the “mother” – the main cross-beam beneath the ceiling, the ceramic stove, the sleeping bench atop it, and the male and female corners. He removes some wallpaper from a corner and a piece of a mid-twentieth century newspaper comes along with it. On the other side of the wall, bright sunlight shines on the village street, the wind whistles.

As we are talking, a neighbor enters through the open door. “Nikit, the guys can sheathe everything up with siding. I can get you a fair price.”

“No, thanks,” The German answers respectfully. “I would like everything to be done the old way, authentically.”

While showing me the outskirts of the village of Pezhma, 65-year-old Alexander Kelarev recounts the adventures of the local two-hundred-year-old Chapel of Zosima and Savvaty.

“When they erected the frame,” Kelarev says, “the residents of Yelinskaya, which is just beyond the ravine a bit, got jealous and at night dragged the chapel to their hillock. Of course, the residents of Yekushevskaya objected and dragged the chapel back.”

Today the route to the church is barely visible. There is no one left to beat a path to the chapel; there are almost no residents left in the neighboring village.

We go along the hillocks and over the bridge to the other side of the Pezhma River, where, on a rise, stands the chapel named for Saints Kirik and Ulita. Kelarev recalls how even as late as the early 1990s they held large holiday feasts around the chapel, filled tables with food, and celebrated late into the evening. But later there were neither hands nor funds to be found to save it.

“There were paintings on canvas and icons,” Kelarev says, “but at some point, people turned it into a makeshift gym and worked out on ropes hung from the ceiling. And then the dome simply collapsed.”

We then traveled for a long time by car off-road, wandering around places from Alexander’s childhood and youth. We entered an aunt’s empty home, overgrown with black currant bushes, in a completely uninhabited village. And then we simply stopped on the banks of the Pezhma, lit a fire with dry branches, and Kelarev’s children huddled around it in the grass. They set a pot over the fire and put in young potatoes they had dug up the day before, and we basked in the fire until late in the evening.

“To the extent anything is being restored in the North,” says Father Superior Feodosy (Kuritsyn), rector of the Alexander-Oshevensky Monastery, “it is mainly being done by visiting volunteers. The state does not allocate anything, because there is no one to allocate anything to. The majority of seriously endangered churches have no owner.”

At first sight, the monastery looks abandoned, surrounded by crumbling walls, with a broken-down stone church rising from the middle of the space. But it turns out that inside the walls there are neat paths, a small church built above the entrance gate, and some of the cells have been repaired.

“Everyone wants to hear about the miracles that took place in these holy sites,” Father Feodosy says. “And yes, the fact that this church has been preserved is already a miracle.” He smiles and points to the wooden Church of the Epiphany, seemingly floating above the ground, like a heavenly sailboat.

Inside, we speak with Feodosy at the old altar, which looks back at us through empty icon frames. “In the early 2000s, there were three huge thefts here,” he says, “they completely plundered the iconostasis. The final robbery took 45 icons.”

As he talks about the natural and human disasters that have led to the emptying out of hundreds of wooden chapels and churches in the district, Feodosy admits, “It sounds awful, but I’ve grown accustomed to it. People from Moscow and St. Petersburg see this and are shocked, but I have been living for several years with this pain.”

Thirty kilometers east of the Oshevensky churchyard the priest Andrei Usachev serves in the new wooden church of Pakhomy Kensky, in Arkhangelo. He drives here from Kargopol – 60 kilometers away – and it is not his only parish.

Rays of sunshine beam through the small, traditional windows during the service, attended by no more than ten people, creating a special, sacramental aura. The prayers are audible, and it smells of incense and pine needles.

“There are two ancient churches in the village,” Father Andrei explains. “But restoring them and getting permits requires many millions. That is beyond the powers of this village, and even of the district. It turns out it was ten times cheaper to simply build a new wooden church.”

Then Father Andrei explains how several years ago Matyukhin, then a student, came here with a group of restorers, how he moved here and now sings in the choir. “Here in the North, locals often don’t know if this is something they need – restoration of churches and the Christian life. They don’t have sufficient awareness of the land on which they live, of the history that these places breathe.”

And then he continues, recalling Matyukhin, “And yet these other people have proven that they love the Russian North with all their heart. So to them I give a deep bow.

A few preservationist organizations in Russia: verenitsa.ru, dom-restavros.ru, fondvnimanie.ru, Tsfest.ru.