Description of the house: a recipe for a "delicious" composition. Abandoned old house Russian old wooden houses

The Slavs took the construction of a new house very seriously, because they had to live in it for many years. In advance, they selected a place for the future dwelling and trees for construction. Pine or spruce was considered the best wood: a house made of it was strong, a pleasant coniferous smell emanated from the logs, and people in such a house were less likely to get sick. If there was no coniferous forest nearby, then they cut down oak or larch. Construction began in late autumn. Men from all over the village felled the forest and built a log house without windows and doors right on the edge of the forest, which remained standing until early spring. This was done so that the logs would “lay down” during the winter, get used to each other.

In early spring, the log house was dismantled and transferred to the chosen place. The perimeter of the future house was marked directly on the ground with a rope. For the foundation along the perimeter of the house, they dug a hole 20-25 cm deep, covered it with sand, laid it with stone blocks or tarred logs. Later they began to use a brick foundation. Layers of birch bark were laid on top in a dense layer, they did not let water through and protected the house from dampness. Sometimes a quadrangular log crown, installed around the perimeter of the house, was used as a foundation, and log walls were already laid on it. According to the old pagan customs, which even today the Russian people coexist with the true Christian faith, a piece of wool (for warmth), coins (for wealth and prosperity), incense (for holiness) were laid under each corner of the crown.

During the construction of the house, even the number of logs in the walls mattered, it was different, depending on the customs accepted in the area. There were many ways to fasten logs in the corners, but the most common were two - a frame "in the oblo" and "in the paw". With the first method, uneven ledges remained in the corners of the house, which were called the remainder. We have known such houses since childhood from illustrations for Russian folk tales. But the protruding parts of the logs in the huts were of particular importance - they protected the corners of the house from freezing in the frosty winter. But the log house "in the paw" made it possible to expand the space of the house. With this method, the logs were connected to each other at the very ends, it was much more difficult, so this method was used less frequently. In any case, the logs fit very tightly to each other, and for greater thermal insulation, the cracks were pierced with moss and caulked.

The sloping roof was laid out with chips, straw, aspen planks. Oddly enough, the thatched roof was the most durable, because it was filled with liquid clay, dried in the sun and became strong. A log was laid along the roof, decorated with skillful carvings from the facade, most often it was a horse or a rooster. It was a kind of amulet that protected the house from harm. Before starting finishing work, a small hole was left in the roof of the house for several days, it was believed that through it the evil spirits should fly out of the house. The floor was covered with halves of logs from the door to the window. There was a space between the foundation and the floor, which served as an underground for food storage (basement), here the owner could arrange a workshop, and in winter cattle were kept in the basement. The room itself was called a cage, it could be entered through a low door with a high threshold, the windows in the Russian hut were small, usually there were three on the front side and one on the side.

In a Russian hut there was usually one room. The main place in it was occupied by the oven. The larger the oven, the more heat it gave, in addition, food was cooked in the oven, old people and children slept on it. Many rituals and beliefs were associated with the oven. It was believed that a brownie lives behind the stove. It was impossible to take out the rubbish from the hut, and it was burned in the oven.
When matchmakers came to the house, the girl climbed onto the stove and watched the conversation between her parents and the guests from there. When she was called, she got down from the stove, which meant that she agreed to get married, and the wedding invariably ended with an empty pot thrown into the stove: how many shards break, so many children will be young.

Next to the stove was the so-called "woman's corner". Here, women cooked food, did needlework, and stored dishes. It was separated from the room by a curtain and was called "kut" or "zakut". The opposite corner was called "red", holy, here stood an icon, hung a lamp. In the same corner was a dining table with benches. Wide shelves were nailed along the walls under the ceiling, on them were festive dishes and caskets that served as decorations for the house, or things needed in the household were stored. In the corner between the stove and the door, under the ceiling, a wide shelf was built in - a bed.

In the old Russian hut there was not so much furniture: the already mentioned table, benches along the walls, on which they not only sat, but also slept, a small open cupboard for dishes, several massive chests upholstered with iron strips for storing clothes and linen - that, perhaps, and the whole setting. The floors were covered with knitted or woven rugs, outerwear served as blankets.

According to the old tradition, the cat was first allowed into the house, and only then they entered themselves. In addition, hot coals in a pot were taken from the old house, as a symbol of the hearth, they brought a brownie in a bast shoes or felt boots, icons and bread.

Ordinary peasants lived in log huts, while boyars and princes built bigger houses for themselves and decorated them richer - towers and chambers. Terem was a high and bright living space built over the entrance hall or simply on a high basement. A staircase with a high porch led to the tower, decorated with carvings and resting on carved wooden posts.
The room itself was often painted and also decorated with carvings, forged bars were inserted into large windows, and the high roof was even covered with real gilding. In the tower there were rooms and rooms, in which, according to folk tales, beautiful girls lived and spent all their time doing needlework. But there were, of course, other rooms in the tower, connected by passages and stairs.

Until the 16th century, houses in Ancient Russia were wooden, they often burned, so that practically nothing remained of the buildings of those times. In the 16th century, stone buildings appeared, and then brick ones. They are built on the same principle as wooden houses, even stone carving repeats the motifs characteristic of wooden architecture, but ordinary people preferred to live in log huts for several centuries. So it was more familiar, and healthier, and cheaper.

If we need to scare readers, the surest way is to use the fear of the unknown.

When people encounter an inexplicable phenomenon, even a fictional one, they automatically have the reaction we need.

Method 1. “Wrong” color

Imagine a hospital room painted blood red. How about a dirty swamp-colored children's room? Tiles in the kitchen - with cheerful scarlet peas, suspiciously resembling drops of blood ... A sweet girl with white pupils - like a boiled fish ...

All this looks “wrong”, and therefore disturbs the subconscious of the reader.

Method 2. Inconsistency with the place or situation

Suppose the main character enters the room - into the most ordinary room, looks around and suddenly discovers ... something. For example, a small piece of meat dried to the wall or a doorknob screwed not to the door, but to the wall.

A suspicious object simultaneously arouses both curiosity and anxiety, and it is already difficult for the reader to tear himself away from the book - he wants to know what will happen next.

Method 3: Suspicious activities

Actions and sounds that clearly do not correspond to the usual order of things act on our subconscious in a similar way, but only to an even greater extent. If something moves “incorrectly”, a “danger signal” instantly lights up in our brain.

Imagine that the surface of the table you are sitting at suddenly starts to bubble and crack. All this is scary only because it is inexplicable (well, the table, of course, is a pity - after all, it costs money).

Dig into your nightmares: what scared you the most? I once dreamed that all my dog's teeth fell out at once.

Method 4. Sinister item

There are a number of items that, by definition, look suspicious to our subconscious:

Mirrors (as a portal to another reality)
Thick curtains (who knows what lies behind them)
locked doors
Dirty, disheveled dolls (our subconscious does not like childhood to be associated with decline, death and decay).
Sink or basin with suspicious liquid
Broken railing at high altitude

Things related to death and pain

Attributes of funeral and mourning
syringes
Dirty bandages
Bones
blood stains
dead plants
Artificial flowers (a trifle, but rather symbolic)

Anything related to sinister superstitions

crows
Black Cats
Number 13
Ugly old men and women, like evil sorcerers

Everything related to abandoned housing

Ruins
abandoned houses
Thick layer of dust
cracked glass
boarded up doors

Method 5. Associations and metaphors

You can focus readers' attention on objects that serve as a warning to the hero. It can be, for example, a dead butterfly stuck in a web, or a flashing bright red sign over a locked door - “No way out”.

Method 6. Words-keys

Many words in Russian carry a “gloomy charge”. By themselves, such words will not scare anyone, but in combination with the right images, they can have a very powerful effect. For example:

Slimy
Gloomy
Uterine
Mogilny
Moldy
Creepy, etc.

Make a list of adjectives and adverbs related to threat, anxiety, death, and decay, and you have a “horror vocabulary” that you can adapt to your story.

Method 7. Playing on ancient human instincts

Darkness, night forest, cemeteries, eyes of a predator glowing in the dark, dim lighting, smells of decay, etc. by definition cause fear in a person.

It may sound trite, but it works, because we will not get away from instincts that are many thousands of years old. Everything that frightened our distant ancestors, clinging to the fire in the darkness of the cave, still frightens us.

If you want to show readers a creepy place, describe it from the point of view of a character who already perceives the world in a certain way. He does not notice everything in a row, but only what has a special, sinister meaning for him.

It is one thing if your reader looks at what is happening from the point of view of an outside observer, and quite another if he has got used to the image of the hero and worries about him as for himself.

A peasant hut made of logs has been considered a symbol of Russia from time immemorial. According to archaeologists, the first huts appeared in Russia 2 thousand years ago BC. For many centuries, the architecture of wooden peasant houses remained practically unchanged, combining everything that every family needed: a roof over their heads and a place where you can relax after a hard day's work.

In the 19th century, the most common plan of a Russian hut included a dwelling (hut), a canopy and a crate. The main room was a hut - a heated living space of a square or rectangular shape. A crate was used as a storage room, which was connected to the hut at the expense of a canopy. In turn, the canopy was a utility room. They were never heated, so they could only be used as living quarters in the summer. Among the poor strata of the population, a two-chamber layout of the hut, consisting of a hut and a vestibule, was common.

The ceilings in wooden houses were flat, they were often hemmed with painted hemp. The floors were made of oak bricks. The decoration of the walls was carried out with the help of red board, while in rich houses the decoration was supplemented with red leather (less wealthy people usually used matting). In the 17th century, ceilings, vaults and walls began to be decorated with paintings. Benches were placed around the walls under each window, which were securely fastened directly to the structure of the house itself. Approximately at the level of human height above the benches along the walls, long shelves made of wood, which were called crows, were equipped. On the shelves located along the room, they kept kitchen utensils, and on others - tools for men's work.

Initially, the windows in Russian huts were portage, that is, viewing windows that were cut in adjacent logs half a log up and down. They looked like a small horizontal slot and were sometimes decorated with carvings. They closed the opening (“clouded”) with the help of boards or fish bubbles, leaving a small hole (“peeper”) in the center of the valve.

After some time, the so-called red windows, with a frame, framed by jambs, became popular. They had a more complex design than portage ones, and were always decorated. The height of the red windows was at least three diameters of a log in a log house.

In poor houses, the windows were so small that when they were closed, the room became very dark. In rich houses, windows were closed from the outside with iron shutters, often using pieces of mica instead of glass. From these pieces it was possible to create various ornaments, painting them with images of grass, birds, flowers, etc. with the help of paints.

In general, it is quite difficult to judge the age of a building by visual signs. Because the early architectural techniques as a stable tradition could be preserved in later times. As a rule, the oldest houses are characterized by an amazing quality of finishing of details and the accuracy of their fitting to each other, which later gave way to simpler and more technological methods. But even these features do not give us the right to unambiguously name even the century of construction. Quite accurate is the method of dendrochronological analysis, the essence of which is to compare log cuts with a pattern of a tree trunk recorded in a certain year. But this method also indicates only the time at which the tree was cut down, and not the year of construction. Therefore, one can easily imagine a situation when crowns or individual logs of an older log house were used in the construction of a house. Perhaps the most reliable are the dates obtained at the intersection of several methods: dendrochronological analysis, analysis of architectural features and the study of archival documents.

Treasure of Russia - ancient wooden churches

Church of the Deposition of the Robe in the village of Borodava. Drawing from N. A. Martynov's album. 1860s

The oldest wooden building in Russia is the Church of the Deposition of the Robe from the village of Borodava, the date of its consecration is October 1 (14), 1485. During its long life, the church has undergone changes more than once - the roof covering could change up to 10 times, in the middle of the 19th century the open a gallery on pillars - a mound that surrounded the refectory of the church, the walls were repeatedly hewn and small details were partially changed.
In 1957, she was transported to the territory of the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve. The church is being studied, thorough restoration work is being carried out, the purpose of which is to return the church to its original appearance, while preserving all the details that have survived to our time.

Church of the Deposition of the Robe from the village of Borodava on the territory of the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve

The Vitoslavitsy Museum, which is located near Veliky Novgorod, has a number of old churches. The earliest of them is the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin from the village of Peredki, the time of its creation is 1531.

Church of the Nativity of the Virgin from the village of Peredki in the Museum of Architecture "Vitoslavitsy" in Veliky Novgorod

An interesting monument from the beginning of the 17th century is located in the small town of Slobodskoy, not far from Kirov. This is the Church of Michael the Archangel built in 1610. Once it was part of the Epiphany (later - Holy Cross) Monastery. After the revolution, the historical building was used as a warehouse of church property from the demolished monastery churches, and it was tightly sheathed with boards on all sides. After restoration in 1971-1973. The Church traveled to Paris for the exhibition "Russian wooden plastic from ancient times to the present day." There the church was established near the Champs Elysees. From this voyage, the unique monument returned to the square in the center of Slobodsky, where it remains to this day. It is worth noting that the author of the restoration project, as in the case of the Church of the Deposition of the Robe, was Professor B. V. Gnedovsky.

Church of Michael the Archangel in Slobodskoy, Kirov region

Fortunately, other monuments of wooden architecture of the 16th-17th centuries have been preserved, but they all belong to temple architecture; there are no residential buildings of this age. There are plenty of explanations for this. Firstly, the type of exploitation itself contributed to a better preservation of wood. Secondly, the churches were not rebuilt, only some structural details were changed. The houses were completely dismantled, reconstructed in accordance with the needs of the owners and the peculiarities of the time. In addition, churches, which, as a rule, stood aside from residential buildings, and were more biasedly guarded, nevertheless burned less.
However, the study of monuments of temple architecture does not give us an idea about the architecture of a peasant dwelling. Of course, there were also general construction methods, but one must remember that the churches were built by professionals, and the houses were built by the peasants themselves with the help of relatives and neighbors. When decorating the church, all known decorative techniques were used, and the peasant house was not decorated for reasons of the position of peasants in Russian society.

HouseXVIIcentury

What, after all, was a house of the 17th century? Among the documents of that time, rather detailed descriptions of buildings in the yards, their interior decoration, and information about construction techniques have been preserved. In addition to written sources, there are drawings and travel sketches of foreigners, The most interesting drawings are given in the book of Adam Olearius "Description of a Journey to Muscovy". Also, a large set of sketches was made by the artists of the Augustin Meyerberg embassy. These drawings are made from life and are very realistic, painted (rather tinted) with watercolors.

It must be said that the artists of that time quite accurately reproduced what they saw. To this should be added the drawings of individual structures, courtyards, which give a fairly accurate idea of the size and layout of buildings. This information, which clarifies our ideas about residential and outbuildings of the 17th century, is still incomplete and uneven, the dwellings of the ruling classes, especially the royal mansions, are much better known, peasant dwellings are described extremely sparingly.

Adam Olearius, "Journey to Muscovy"

However, let's try to summarize what we know.

The hut was cut from large logs: pine, spruce, and the lower crowns - often from oak or larch. The main building module was a log 2 to 4 fathoms long. For conifers (spruces, pines), a well-known "standard" was developed - with a thickness of 20-30 cm, the length of the logs was 3-4 fathoms (1 fathom = 213.36 cm). The limitation of the length of the log to the indicated dimensions did not depend on the height of the tree, but on the extent to which the difference in the thickness of the log between the butt and the top turned out to be so insignificant that it did not interfere with the construction (practically the log was an even cylinder).
Somewhat retreating from the edge (30 cm), at each end the logs were cut down to half the thickness of the recess - "cup". On two such parallel logs, another pair was laid in the recesses across, in which recesses for the next transverse pair were also cut down. Four logs connected in this way made up the crown of the log house.

The connection of the logs of the log house "in the oblo"

The height of the log house depended on the number of crowns, judging by the drawings of contemporaries, there were 6-7 of them, that is, the height of the log house was 2.4-2.8 m. To better fit the logs to each other, a groove was made in the upper or lower part, and the grooves moss was laid between the crowns. Such a simple felling of log cabins was called a felling "in the oblo", and most of the houses were built in this way both in villages and in cities. The internal area of such a room could be quite small - about 12 sq.m, but the vast majority of residential buildings were built from three-yard logs, that is, their area reached 25 sq.m. These dimensions, determined by the properties of the building material, have been observed to be the most stable over the centuries.

The dwelling of ordinary townspeople. Fragment of the plan of Tikhvinsky Posad, 1678

The roof of peasant huts and other buildings was gable. The side walls were reduced to a ridge, forming two slopes of logs. There are no documentary data on the arrangement of ceilings in peasant huts. The arrangement of windows in peasant huts, well known to us from drawings, makes us think that flat ceilings did not yet exist in these dwellings. They appear a century later.
Two light windows were usually cut through between the two upper rims of the wall, and the third, a smoke window, was even higher, almost under the very ridge of the roof. With the firebox of the huts then prevailing among the peasants in a black way, through this window, mainly smoke from the stoves went. If there were flat ceilings in the huts, then they would block the way for smoke and cutting through the third window would become nonsense in this case. Apparently, if ceilings were made in the huts, they were vaulted. Or the roof logs themselves served as the ceiling at the same time.

Adam Olearius, "Journey to Muscovy"

Fragmentary information about the floors in the peasant dwelling. Whether the floors were always made of wood or they were left earthen - it is impossible to say. Ethnographic information on the XVIII-XIX centuries. show the widespread use of earthen floors among Russian peasants in the central and even northern provinces.

An obligatory element of the hut was a stove. These stoves were heated in black. No chimneys, no wooden chimneys in the mass peasant dwelling of the 17th century. not yet, although both were often used in the dwellings of feudal lords and wealthy citizens. They made stoves out of clay; in terms of strength, such stoves were superior to brick ones, as far as is known from ethnographic analogies.

Russian stove without a chimney, smoke came out directly from the hearth. The picture is taken from the Internet resource.

The interior layout of the hut was quite simple: in one of the corners (for the 17th century, perhaps, even in the front), where there were windows that pulled out smoke, a stove was placed. On the side of the stove, bunk beds were laid - beds. Whether these beds were low, at the level of 1-1.2 m from the ground, or high, it is definitely impossible to say. But one can think that the northern and central groups of the Russian peasantry appeared a little later, in the 18th century, when the stove was placed at the entrance, at the back.

Benches stretched along the walls of the hut, so wide that one could sleep on them. Above the benches were arranged special shelves - polavochniki. In the corner, opposite the stove, they put a small table with an underframe. in the 19th and even in the 20th centuries. there were still old tables, with a barred underframe, where chickens were kept. In the same corner where the table was, there was also a "holy", "red" corner with a shrine for icons.

The living space of a smokehouse, or black hut. The picture is taken from the Internet resource, it quite accurately shows the course of smoke from the hearth, the type of ceiling, but the samovar is clearly superfluous here.

Even in the summer, such a hut was semi-dark, as it was illuminated by small porthole windows (about 60 × 30 cm), and in the winter such windows were covered with a film of a bull's bladder or payus (payus is a film in which sturgeon caviar and other fish are located, thin and transparent), and moreover, they were "clouded" with a board, reinforced in the grooves. The hut was illuminated only by a stove fire or a torch fixed in a light or a wall gap.
So, the hut of the 17th century is a small structure with a rectangular or square base, a simple gable roof, and three small slit-like windows located quite high.
City houses differed only slightly from the village ones, retaining basically all the same elements.

HouseXVIIIcentury

In the 18th century, the wooden house undergoes a number of changes. First of all, the ceiling changes, it becomes flat, this entails a change in the flow of smoke, in order for it to come out, chimneys (chimneys) are arranged, and the windows, having lost their purpose, shift down and serve to illuminate the hut. Despite this, in many ways, the houses remain quite primitive. "White" heating - a stove with a pipe - is a rarity. It should be noted that by the time of the abolition of serfdom (1861), more than a third of the peasant huts remained smokehouses, i.e. drowned in black.
Rafter structures appear and, as a result, hipped roofs.

Chimneys (chimneys) - a prototype of the future real chimney. The chimney was placed above the hole in the roof and ceiling and contributed to the creation of traction, thanks to which the smoke came out of the hut.

House of the middle of the 18th century from the city of Solvychegodsk

And the tall, richly decorated houses-terems of the Russian North, or the huts of the Nizhny Novgorod region richly decorated with three-dimensional carvings, which are described in such detail in the books that we admire in museums of wooden architecture - all of them appear only in the 19th century, and most of them only in the second half of it, after the abolition of serfdom. It was this transformation of Russian society that made possible the development of a personal economy, the improvement of the financial situation of the Russian peasant, the emergence of independent artisans and free residents of cities, who, in turn, were able to fearlessly decorate their homes, according to prosperity.

House in Uglich

The house in Uglich is the oldest residential building in Russia. Older houses are not fixed. Photographs of two buildings dating back to the 18th century are given in the pre-war book "Russian Wooden Architecture" (S. Zabello, V. Ivanov, P. Maksimov, Moscow, 1942). One house is no longer there, but the second has been miraculously preserved.

Photo of a preserved house from the book "Russian Wooden Architecture"

The House of the Voronins (formerly the Furs) is located on the banks of the Stone Creek, its address: st. Kamenskaya, 4. This is one of the few examples of wooden township (urban) housing that have survived in our country. The house was built in the first half - the middle of the XVIII century. Its uniqueness also lies in the fact that it was built before the regular building plan of Uglich in 1784, approved by Catherine II. In fact, this house is an intermediate link between the medieval and the planned city.

The same house in a later photo

Here is a description of the house from one of the Internet sources: "This house is on a high basement, which was once used for household needs, used to have both a tower and a summer attic room. The staircase to the residential floor was once located outside, and now inside at home, it leads to the vestibule, which divides the floor into two parts: the living room and the summer room. The railing of the stairs and the bench on the upper platform are decorated with a modest ornament. The attraction of the house is a magnificent tiled stove. "

Tiled stove in the Mekhovy-Voronin house

The Mekhovs are an ancient family of city merchants, philistines who, judging by their surnames, were engaged in furrier business. Ivan Nikolaevich Mekhov at the beginning of the 20th century was the owner of a small brick factory. And now on the old Uglich houses you can find bricks with the brand of his factory - "INM".
The fate of the house is usual for Russia - the owners were evicted, dispossessed, exiled, strangers settled in the house, who did not care about maintaining it in exemplary order, respectively, the house was dilapidated. It was resettled only in the 1970s. The house without people collapsed even faster, they even had to put props so that it would not fall into the stream. At that time, the unique building was on the balance sheet of the Uglich Museum. In 1978-79, a decision was made to restore it with the money of the Society for the Protection of Cultural Monuments. The brick plinth was restored, the lower crowns of the log house were replaced, and the interior of the house was restored. The stove with tiles was restored, the roof was sorted out.

Door in the basement of the Mekhovy-Voronin house

In the nineties, when there was not enough money everywhere, the Mekhovy-Voronin house was mothballed until better times. Paradoxically, the years of the 2000s became fatal for the Mekhovy-Voronins' house, when it was recognized as a monument of federal significance. Let us explain what this term means: no one has the right to touch it. That is, it can be destroyed, but not a single person, under pain of criminal punishment, has the right to touch it. Except the state. And the state, preoccupied with universal projects, such as the Olympiad of all times and peoples, is unlikely to remember a modest wooden house in the Russian outback.
As expected, the status of "Protected by the state" did not protect the house from the homeless and other marginalized individuals, but put an end to the museum's attempts to save this house.

Remains of a high porch

However, in 2014, the homeless were evicted from the house, the windows and doors were boarded up, and the house was surrounded by a metal fence. What's next is unknown. Perhaps it will remain so until the next emergency, and perhaps, as we would like to hope, it will be restored soon, and we will be able to admire the unique monument not only from afar, but also close up and from the inside.

This is what the house looks like now. It is impossible to get closer to him because of the fence with a frightening sign

The windows of the residential floor are more recent. But two windows in the basement, if not the same age as the house, but still older than the top

Basement window. Its earlier origin may be evidenced by the construction without a window sill.

The information for writing this article was collected by the author over the course of several years from a variety of wonderful books, many of which are listed on the site dedicated to Russian architraves.

Numerous trips to the Urals and Russia, which the author has been carrying out since 2003, turned out to be just as important.
Remarkable Russian scientists Gerold Ivanovich Vzdornov, Mikhail Nikolaevich Sharomazov, artist and restorer Lyudmila Lupushor, historian and founder of the Museum "Nevyansk Icon" provided invaluable assistance.

Ecology of consumption. House: Lost in the forests of Chukhloma of stunning beauty is the ancient Russian house-tower of the village of Pogorelovo. Two storey with bay windows...

Old Russian house-terem

Lost in the forests of Chukhloma of stunning beauty is the ancient Russian house-tower of the village of Pogorelovo. The two-story wooden house with bay windows and a turret is truly unique and is definitely a fine example of wooden architecture, if not an architectural monument.

The old Russian house-terem in Pogorelovo is original in its eclecticism - a building with a complex three-dimensional layout, echoing the best examples of country cottages in the Russian style, with incredibly rich interiors of front rooms, at the same time, it is completely practical from a rustic point of view - everything here is done according to the mind and everything is adapted for farming.

Having passed the age of 100 years, the house has never been restored, thus retaining its original decor and original interior painting.

540 km from Moscow, between Suday and Chukhloma, there is a picturesque region stretching along the banks of the Viga River. Even 25 years ago, there was the village of Pogorelovo, the first written mention of which dates back to the beginning of the 17th century. Today, all that remains of the village is only the name and the skeletons of wooden log cabins.

But, not otherwise than by a miracle, on a small hill there is still a single surviving and living house.

This house was built in 1902-1903. local peasant-otkhodnik I.I. Polyashov.

The inhabitants of the village of Pogorelovo were state (state) peasants who could go to work (as opposed to appanage) or conduct a craft in their native land.

One of these otkhodniks was Ivan Ivanovich Polyashov, popularly nicknamed Polyash.

Ivan Ivanovich had artels of carpenters and carvers - he was engaged in the construction of country houses and small architectural forms in St. Petersburg and its environs, i.e. was a contractor.

The Terem is a 2-storey building, cut from logs, on a brick plinth and sheathed on the outside with calved timber.

The large volume is complicated on the facades by risalits, a bay window and a low turret; the roof is completed by a skylight and a mezzanine. The overhangs of the roof are decorated with sawn ornamental gaps, the openwork pattern of which resembles embroidery. The facades are decorated with an exquisite pattern of sawn carvings and several types of architraves of various shapes.

On the one hand, a 2-story utility part of the house was originally attached to the house (dismantled in 1973, now it looks like a veranda), which is typical for peasant houses in the northern region.

According to one version, the construction of this house was carried out by a German architect who helped Polyashov with a mill and a sawmill on the Viga River.

According to another, the design of the house was made by Polyashov himself, who in his lifetime built many dachas near St. Petersburg. This version seems to be more plausible.

The Pogorelovskiy Terem echoes the best examples of country cottages in the Russian style, with incredibly rich interiors of the front rooms.

On the main staircase you can immediately go up to the 2nd floor, where the living rooms and master bedrooms were located. But perhaps the most beautiful place in the whole house is the front hall.

So richly decorated, both in carving and painting, that if it weren’t for pastel colors, it would be full of eyes.

Just amazingly, a century later, all this has come down to us in its original form. And not somewhere in a large city, but in the real wilderness.

Although, after 1917, all agricultural equipment and cattle were taken away from the Polyashovs, they left the house to the family. Before collectivization, the family lived in their own house, after which Ivan Ivanovich and his family were left with only a small part of the house on the 1st floor, and the rest of the premises were occupied by different offices.

Polyashov died in his house, but his wife had to leave the village immediately after her husband's funeral.

While there was life in the village, the house housed a kindergarten, a forestry office, and a school.

But by the end of the 1960s, the village became unpromising.In 1972, the village council closed and left the Polyashovsky house.

The house would undoubtedly have disappeared if it weren't for sheer luck.A couple of Moscow avant-garde artists - Anatoly Zhigalov and Natalia Abalakova - made a kayaking trip along the Viga River that same summer and, quite by chance, noticed this house and bought it.

Since then, the house has been somehow supported only by Anatoly's own forces. published . If you have any questions on this topic, ask them to specialists and readers of our project .