Two Unique Churches

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31339, 8 April 1967, Page 5

Two Unique Churches

(From the Novosti Press Agency) This church, with 22 cupolas, has stood for 250 years; it is built of wood and has no metal nails or clamps; its builders used only one tool, the axe.

The Church of the Transfiguration stands on Kizhi Island, Lake Onega, north of Russia. It was built in 1714 on the orders of Peter the Great (or so it is believed), in honour of his victories over the Swedes. Legends and chronicles have carried down the name of its builder, Nester the Carpenter. After finishing his job, he cast his axe in the lake so that nobody could ever build anything like it. Only after seeing the Church of the Transfiguration can one understand how its author came to be a legendary figure.

The 35-metre building, erected, as the historians say, without a single drawing and by intuition alone, couples an almost gauzy lightness with the might of a fortification. This is a very complex structure with a great many soaring arches, cornices, cunningly hidden waterpipes and tight-wedged jeints. In its time, the church served both for the performance of religious rites and as a place of temporal assembly. Therefore, inside it resembles an ordinary peasant house, and only the iconostasis with its pictures of the saints betrays the building’s religious affiliation. Even the ceiling is painted in a pattern of flowers and grasses—the traditional ornament of the northern lands of Russia.

In those days a new church usually repeated a former one, so that the. wooden churches built in the. 18th century bring down to us the architecture of the past

Next to the Church of the Transfiguration stands the Church of the Intercession, built half a century later. Topped with nine cupolas, like the Church of the Transfiguration, its logs are so tightly hammered together that a razor blade cannot be inserted between them. From the outside it produces a somewhat “flippant” impression because of its ornament passing along the middle part of the building. But on closer inspection it is found to be as monumental and mighty as the Church of the Transfiguration. The ensemble of Kizhi churches is particularly beautiful during the sunrise or sunset Well conversant with the qualities of different types of wood, the builders roofed the church cupolas with wooden tiles er lemekhi, hewn out of asp with an axe. This tree’s timber possesses the quality of changing its colour depending on the weather and sunlighting. It shines like silver during the day, glows like burnished copper in the sunset and becomes light blue at dawn. It took 45,000 lemekhi to roof the cupolas of the two buildings. Quant’s Dyes “The fashion designer, Mary Quant has got together with the Dylon people to produce a new range of stocking dyes,” reported Allan Murray in the 8.8. C. World Service programme “New Ideas.” “They’re very qulekacting—they need only 10 minutes to take hold—and the 20 colours cover the complete range of with-it shades. In Britain they’re going to sell at a shilling a packet when they come into the shops.”