anglomedved

The movement to preserve derelict wooden churches in Northern Russia, which I joined in this summer, leaves certain questions in my mind. Let me explain by comparison with icons, the other main traditional religious artifact of Russia.

Nionyezhskaya chapel in the 1970s - then serving as a grain store for the local kolkhoz.

Nionyezhskaya chapel as we found it his summer.

Icons were never intended to last. After fifty or a hundred years, when they had become too knocked about or caked with candle and incense soot, they would be burned and new ones painted. Looking back with modern eyes, some of the replacements were, aesthetically and spiritually, an advance on those they replaced, others were inferior. But icon-painting was an ongoing process. And no one really regretted the old icons lost to this constant renewal process, indeed people hardly knew what an icon painted in a previous period looked like. And now that icon painting is back on a firm artistic and spiritual-creative footing, most of the icons people restore today, and which have escaped time and the Bolsheviks, are of more sentimental or historical than spiritual value.

I rather wonder whether we should not view the wooden churches of Northern Russia in rather the same way. While an enormous number have been lost or gone derelict owing to neglect and population movements during the Bolshevik period, I am not sure they were ever really built to last more than 150 or 200 years at the most. A natural process has simply been hastened. Or rather the first part of a process - decay before producing anew. I ask: where does it really make sense to restore them or else mothball them (that is, make them watertight and clear around their bottom to prevent rotting of the lowest logs and leave for later decisions)?

Shouldn’t many of them not be simply left to rot? If churches are really needed - for worship, identity, sense of heritage or whatever - should one not many times simply continue the age-old process and build anew?