Foreign heritage

BH has been reading Thubron again, this time the book at reference 1. We no longer remember where we got it from, but it seems unlikely that we paid full price for it. 

With the point of the present post being our learning of a custom in some parts of Russia of having large and elaborate summer churches and much smaller winter churches. Presumably, in the olden days before all the natural gas came on-stream, it was not practical to heat the former in the winter.

Bing confirms the existence of this custom, without coming up with a clear-cut example. But he does come up with the churches snapped above, described at reference 2. From where we have it that: '... It’s called the Church of the Transfiguration ... There’s also the Church of the Intercession, called the Winter Church, which dates back to 1764 ... Both of these churches stand on northern Russia’s Kizhi Island ...The Kizhi Pogost (also known as the Kizhi enclosures) were built on Kizhi Island, one of thousands of islands in Lake Onega in the Karelia region. While the Republic of Karelia is part of Russia, this northwestern region of the country borders Finland. Lake Onega is the second largest lake in Europe, covering an area of 3,753 square miles...'.

So in the snap above I think the large church left is the summer church, the small church right is the winter church, with the bell tower between the two of them. All originally made from wood, in the case of the summer church with wooden nails too.

The island is essentially a heritage operation which as well as these two churches collects up a number of old wooden buildings, gathered up from the surrounding country. Just like us really, with our Downland Museum just down the road!

Oddly, a lot of the island seems to have been labelled in Spanish and Russian in gmaps. I think the present two churches are to be found where it says museum at the top of the snap above - but I am not very confident about that.

The first snap above shows the southern tip of our island, marked by the red pin but more or less lost in the clutter of the northern half of Lake Onega in the second. Roughly, 62.0840765, 35.2132544. St. Petersburg lower left, Finland left.

PS: two snippets from the fairly new-to-me world of Windows 11 and Zbook. First, Edge has suddenly decided to put my first two windows into something called 'Group 1', whatever that might do. Second, the Zbook seems to come with a much more powerful loudspeaker than the Elitebook which it replaced. I can now actually hear music on YouTube and sometimes I even have to turn it down a bit. But a downside is that some websites, including one visited in connection with these churches, are apt to spring, unsolicited, into very noisy life. Which means that they get shut down, unread. Even worse than all the advertisements that festoon some websites.

References

Reference 1: Among the Russians - Colin Thubron - 1983.

Reference 2: https://www.travelawaits.com/2482727/kizhi-pogost-russia-churches/.

Reference 3: https://www.wealddown.co.uk/.