A Forest Terem

For most of its history, Russia has been a country of wood.

Churches, fortresses, and the homes of tsars and prominent boyars were made of stone, while all the rest was wooden. This was not a borrowing from the Varangians or the Greeks, though; wood is the medium of Russia’s only purely home-grown kind of architecture. It has been here forever, and people have forever been nestled inside it, in a snug, creaking, timbered world that could not be more different from our world of concrete and plastic.

This primordial part of Russian culture has been rapidly vanishing over the past century. Most often because nobody owns these ancient wooden structures, so nobody cares. But what is really strange is how hard it is to save these deteriorating pieces of history, even when there are funds to do so. The official tender system still leaves a great deal to be desired, and private initiatives routinely run headlong into bureaucratic brick walls.

But now, literally before our eyes, comes a precedent likely to inject a powerful dose of optimism into anyone unaccustomed to expecting random acts of kindness from the state.

Muscovite Andrei Pavlichenkov works in international finance, travels a lot for work, and spends his leisure time in some pretty unusual ways, from mountain-climbing in Africa to cross-country skiing in parts of Russia that few ever see.

A few years ago, Pavlichenkov’s curiosity prompted him to search for an ornate wooden mansion – a singularly Russian structure known as a terem – that, according to a limited-edition book he had read about the architectural gems of Kostroma Province, was hidden deep in the forest there. And he tracked it down, if just barely, because the house that a century ago had been the jewel in the crown of the large village of Astashovo was now so much part of the forest that it could not even be seen from more than 100 meters away.

Astashovo no longer exists. It lay not far from the remote town of Chukhloma, in an area that had lost more than 90 percent of the communities that had existed there in the mid-twentieth century.

Yet the wilds of Chukhloma are still home to a number of houses that fall into a category extremely rare in Russia – modest-sized but sturdy wooden palaces built entirely by peasants. Huge houses with rooms galore and decorative carved trim in an archetypally peasant style were only built in a few provinces (mostly far to the north of Moscow and St. Petersburg).

Here, near Chukhloma, in defiance of both tradition and subliminal hierarchy, well-to-do peasants took the liberty of creating houses that would not have been out of place in a city or suburb, and that looked a lot like the country houses of the aristocratic elite.

Obviously, there had to be a socioeconomic backstory to explain the appearance of beauty such as this in the back of beyond. The peasants in the vicinity of Chukhloma in the nineteenth century were “the sovereign’s peasants,” which mean that their master was not some neighboring landowner, but the tsar himself. These were people under relatively few restrictions, well-heeled and with a high opinion of themselves. They traded in timber or worked as carpenters. In the latter half of the century, after the Liberation of the Serfs, many of them began to band together in cooperatives and travel to the cities, including the capital, to engage in commerce. Feeling themselves to be proper gentlemen, upon returning, they built themselves homes with a luxurious look and feel that was anything but rustic, sporting grand entrances, almost palatial staircases, tiled stoves, frescoes and stucco moldings.

The terem in what used to be the village of Astashovo is a terem in every sense of the word. It has a tower, a balcony, lacy, multicolored window-frames, weathercocks… it is a Russian fairytale come to life.

It was built in the early twentieth century by Martyan Sazonovich Sazonov, a prosperous peasant cabinetmaker who had assembled a collective of craftsmen to build country homes outside of Petersburg. When he was in his fifties, his wife died and he remarried. His new wife was 21 years old, a sexton’s daughter from a neighboring village. And, as the story goes, he built this mansion for her, inspired by blueprints made by the court architect Ivan Ropet. In fact, the Sazonov House was a reworked version of a Ropet project for a hunting lodge designed for His Majesty Nicholas II.

It was literally fit for a king.

The Vargasovy brothers, rich traders who lived in a neighboring village of Pogorelevo and built a similar terem that has not survived.

Sazonov died in 1914. His wife passed away in a nursing home in the late 1940s.

After the Revolution, the terem first housed the village soviet and then became a collective farm library. The village finally succumbed in 1980 and began to be overtaken by the forest. Sazonov’s tall tower began to tilt, readying to collapse at any moment and crush the building’s framing, which had so far held up well.

Then, in 2005, the inquisitive tourist Andrei Pavlichenkov wandered onto Astashovo’s rutted terrain. There was no way he could look at this moribund fairytale, sigh, and walk away. Instead, he resolved to do whatever he could to save Sazonov’s terem.

“It’s our way,” he said, “to assume that there’s a mythical State out there whose job it is to save these architectural monuments. People walk past a building that’s breathing its last gasp and say, ‘That SOB Putin, that SOB Brezhnev, those communist or democrat SOBs – just look what they’ve done to this country.’ And off they go, when they could at least have done something to prop the building up. The state has no money for monuments like this, and never will. There’s only one answer, and it’s for private citizens to roll up their sleeves. Trying to get an oligarch involved… well, that didn’t fly. It’s 550 kilometers to Moscow, so forget about it. We brought some people of means to the site, and they just walked around it and said, ‘Oh, what a pity! What a house! But it hasn’t got a chance, with all this forest everywhere and no road.’”

So Pavlichenkov himself had to roll up his sleeves.

He began with treks to the district and regional administration offices. There he learned something unexpected – that while this place might be featured in history books, it was not on the state’s list of preservation sites. It did not even have an official address, and the village itself was no longer on the map. This meant that the house did not legally exist, which simplified the task enormously.

On the strength of no more than an oral agreement with the right officials, Pavlichenkov and his friend Vasily Kireyev organized a series of volunteer weekends, during which the trees surrounding the terem were cut down, a crane was brought in, and the slumping tower was sawn off and lowered to the ground. To keep others out of harm’s way, the head of the local administration wielded the chainsaw himself, cutting away the 12 supporting columns so the tower could be lifted out of place. That was a turning point, when locals started to get involved and everyone pitched in.

No one had the slightest idea what to do next. But in 2011 Pavlichenkov made up his mind to take on the house again. After making contact with Alexander Popov, a well-known woodworker and restorer, he was surprised to learn that a construction quote from this craftsman was an order of magnitude lower than the sorts of estimates seen in bids for government projects. It was therefore decided to dismantle the house, transport it to Popov’s shop in Kirillov, replace the rotten beams, and then bring it all back to Astashovo.

First they removed the decorative items, collecting specimens of the molding and the frescoes on the stuccoed walls, the fragments of long-defunct tiled stoves, shards of stained glass from the windows, and so on. Then they went after the walls, which had to be entirely disassembled, since some of the interior load-bearing walls had been destroyed by roof leaks.

As the work progressed, many unexpected odds and ends were discovered. Hidden in the farthest depths of the attic, for instance, they found a revolver manufactured in the 1870s that had probably belonged to Sazonov himself. Every old house preserves the memory of the people who built it, who lived in it. To make out their features, to detect their voices, to know not only their names but also their characters, habits and eccentricities, may be the most magical thing about the profession of restorer.

Alexander Popov spoke about the ghosts of the forgotten forbears who had made this house their home. “When I looked carefully at the terem,” he said, “this is what made me sit up and take notice. It is, by and large, far more like a country house than a peasant residence of the time. But the late-nineteenth-century country houses that I’ve worked in had fully functional toilets and bathrooms with ceramic pipes, and a cistern in the attic. But this terem of ours held no trace of anything like that. A luxurious, three-story home, the lady of the house photographed in her frills and crinolines, and no lavatory! No heated vestibule either. The entrance is through a terrace, through two glass doors… how could anyone live here in winter? And then at last I understood. This was the usual provincial ‘we-know-a-thing-or-two’ mindset coming hard up against the simple rules of nature. Any architect would have told him he couldn’t do it that way. After a few years, Martyan Sazonovich would have felt for himself what he’d done wrong, would have had an additional partition installed at the front entrance and placed a big stove behind it. But to put a toilet not outside but inside the home – where people were living, no less… That was completely against the peasant’s rules.

“I’ve been doing restorations for 40 years,” Popov continued, “and this was my first opportunity to do things as they should be done. Because a private customer doesn’t want the job finished yesterday, which is always how it is with government orders. He gave us time to do the work properly, so we didn’t have to rush. We studied the house step by step and gradually understood what needed to be done with it. It not only revealed its history but even hinted to us where the journey will take us next.”

Yet one nagging question remained: What was to be done with the terem after the restoration? If no one could come up with a practical, viable function for it, then all the hard work would be in vain. This is an issue for all historical architecture, but one that is particularly problematic for a house that stands in the middle of nowhere. They would either have to transport the house to Kostroma’s open-air exhibition of wooden architecture, depriving it of its land and the land of its history, or turn it into a museum, which would be implausible out in the boondocks. Or Pavlichenkov could come and live here, which was not a realistic solution. There was the idea of making the terem into a hotel, something along the lines of a hunting lodge, but that would have involved totally redesigning the interior.

Then the house itself offered a virtually ideal solution, as Popov had always thought it would.

An old photo shows, behind the house, a standalone building that has not survived. There is no information on it. During the restoration, traces of a covered walkway connecting that building to the main house were discovered.

It was thus possible to bring that annex back to life and create a single complex, in which the terem would be a museum and the annex would be a hotel (memoirs, official documents, and anything else that could be dug up about the abandoned villages in the vicinity are already being collected). Since this annex existed in the past, restoring it would not violate the principles of restoration.

The Sazonov house will be preserved, with its floor plan unchanged and without a hint of double-glazing in the whole place. There will not be many visitors, but visitors there will be. Even now, off-roaders, geocachers, and other adventurous tourists are regularly checking up on the building. And, as Pavlichenkov says, “There was a time when Suzdal too was an out-of-the-way hole in the wall, with abandoned churches, until someone came along and made it Russia’s most famous tourist town.”

Here is what has been done to date: the road, which used to be passable only in the driest of weather, has been repaired. The house’s frame has been reassembled; the tower has been restored; the house has been given new siding; and the roof is on. New frames have been made for 26 windows, and replicas of lost, decorative elements have been produced. Only historically authentic building technologies are being used; no modern materials are employed. There is birch-bark waterproofing and heat-retaining brick floors on every story. The residential annex is finished, and the house’s ancient pond system has been refurbished. And all of this, Pavlichenkov tells us, cost about as much as a new house of the same size in a cookie-cutter suburban Moscow development.

But wait – there’s more. Ten kilometers from Astashovo, and also deep in the forest, a chapel that used to stand in the erstwhile village of Golovinskoye, very similar in age and style to the Astashovo terem, has been discovered. It was in terrible shape, because birches growing out of the foundation had broken it apart. In the summer of 2014, restorers collected and measured the wreckage, and transported it to Astashovo.

There are also plans to restore several tumbledown old huts in the vicinity. This is no Suzdal, not by a long shot, but it is already not unreasonable to consider the possibility of turning it into some kind of architectural and ethnographical complex.

In 2014, Pavlichenkov organized Maslenitsa* celebrations here and an Astashovo summer festival as well, complete with accordion players from Chukhloma and other exotica. As many as 200 people gathered – locals and visitors from Moscow and elsewhere, up to and including the Kostroma fire department.

“They invented a cocktail called an ‘Astashovo Libre,’” (rum and kvas) Pavlichenkov recalled. “Later a guy from somewhere in the vicinity came by, wanting to know how it had ended. ‘We sang our heads off and then we all went home.’ ‘And there weren’t any fights?’ ‘Not a one.’ ‘Yes… Good for you, anyway. You don’t see that every day.’ ”

A year ago, Pavlichenkov posted a fascinating proposal on his blog. He was inviting the more neighborly among us to come and apply for a plot of former village land that he had privatized, but only on the condition that they would build no new houses there. Instead, they had to bring in old ones and restore them. I asked him how that was going.

“People are popping up all the time,” he replied, “saying that they’re looking for a lovely, secluded place, so they can live off the land, in harmony with nature, and on and on. Right now it’s basically all kinds of kooks. But when we get the terem going and the serious work starts, everything is going to look different. Actually, getting things done is more complicated than just talking about it. Some headway is being made, though: a former co-worker is about to become my neighbor. So if anyone is in earnest about this, there’s plenty of land and a bunch of empty houses too.” RL

Sometimes people wonder: Why did Astashovo die out? Why did the neighboring villages die out? How did the village sink to such a point? Here is a story that sheds some light on this mystery.

Vladimir Bobrov, head of what was formerly the Zhdanov sovkhoz (state farm), recalled that until the eighties there was no forest here, only fields. Now it is all grown over with trees and brush. The farm used to encompass 34 villages with more than three thousand residents. Now only two people live there.

“In 1957, I wasn’t even 30, and they pushed me into the job of chairman, which had suddenly opened up” Bobrov said. “I was a tractor driver, and it’s scary to look back on what it was like at first. They organized the sovkhoz and ordered us to herd together all the livestock. But where were we supposed to put it? We had no buildings, no feed, just a bitterly cold winter. It was awful. Sheep died in droves. There was so much blundering I thought it must be sabotage.

“One day, a party secretary from the district committee came. It was just before haymaking time. He took me for a drive through the fields and said, ‘What great clover you have; you’d better harvest it right away.’

“But how could I harvest it if it’s not ready yet? You cut it and it’ll just go bad, you won’t have clover or cows.

“I said I wouldn’t do it. He said if I didn’t harvest the clover the next day, I’d be called before the committee’s bureau. They hauled me off to the office in Chukhloma, had me stand at attention: ‘Why didn’t you cut it?’

“I stood there for a while, then sat down and said ‘Go to hell. I’ll go back to my tractor and head out to the field. You can find yourselves some other idiot to serve as chairman.’

“They made a big fuss, but in the end they let me go.

“All the stupidity came from above. The muzhiks knew what they were doing, but the bosses only cared about their own behinds. So the workers took off for the cities, leaving behind men who were either lazy or dumb, and a handful of people like me who can’t live without the countryside.

“Then, toward the end of the 1970s, money started to come in. Everything got better. They started building housing, new farms. And just as normal life was beginning – it only lasted about five years – perestroika came. In 1988 I realized there was no more money and retired, left for Leningrad. I didn’t want to stick around to see what would happen.” — As told to Andrei Pavlichenko

Follow Pavlichenko’s progress on his blog: kopanga.livejournal.com