Church of the Transfiguration, Kizhi
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- According to legend, the master carpenter built the whole church with a single axe and threw it into Lake Onega when he finished, saying it had no equal.
- The church has no stove and is a summer church; in winter services move to the heated nine-domed Church of the Intercession standing beside it.
- An inscription on a cross inside records that its altar was consecrated on 6 June 1714; the names of the builders were never recorded.
- Its log walls hold together without nails, which were used only to fix the shingles of the roofs and domes.
- The frame is built mostly of Scots pine logs about 30 cm thick, many ferried from the mainland, and rests on a stone base without a deep foundation.
- Scholars see a likely model in a many-domed wooden church near Vytegra, built in 1708 and destroyed by fire in 1963.
- In the nineteenth century the church was clad in boards and partly in sheet metal; the restorers of 1949–1959 stripped this away to reveal the original logs.
- During the latest restoration 742 logs were treated or replaced out of some 2,550 timber elements in the whole structure.
- Its gilded, carved iconostasis is about 7 metres high and 23.5 metres long, and its two oldest icons date from the late seventeenth century.
- The church appears as the Slavic civilisation's Wonder in the strategy game Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition.
Why it is worth it
The Church of the Transfiguration on Kizhi is the most famous wooden building in Russia, and one of the most astonishing anywhere: a pyramid of twenty-two domes built entirely of logs, rising 37 metres from a low grassy island in Lake Onega. It was completed in 1714 on the site of an earlier tented church that burned in 1694, and together with the smaller winter church and the bell tower it forms the Kizhi Pogost, on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1990.
The structure is a lesson in how carpenters thought. At its core is an octagonal log frame, with two-stepped wings projecting to the four points of the compass, the eastern one — the altar — five-sided in plan. On top of the main octagon stand two more octagons, each smaller than the last, and every roof surface carries curving "barrel" gables and onion domes of different sizes, so the eye climbs from tier to tier in a rhythm of domes. The domes are clad in aspen shingles. A covered double staircase on carved posts leads to the entrance; inside, a gilded four-tier iconostasis holds 102 icons.
Keeping the church standing has been a saga of its own. Restorations in the 1950s were followed by an emergency in 1980, when the building was closed and an internal steel frame was inserted to stop it from collapsing. A full restoration began in 2009, lifting the church in sections so that rotten logs could be treated or replaced from below; about 70 per cent of the original fabric was kept, and some 34,000 aspen shingles were renewed. The church opened to visitors again in June 2021, and its iconostasis was returned to its place in the order recorded in nineteenth-century inventories.
Getting there
Kizhi Island lies in Lake Onega, about 68 km by water from Petrozavodsk; the straight-line distance from the city is about 56 km. From mid-May to early October, Meteor hydrofoils run from Petrozavodsk's river terminal on Karl Marx Street, a crossing of about 1 hour 15 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes; in winter, tours reach the island by hovercraft. The nearest airport is Petrozavodsk (PES). The church stands within the open-air museum of the Kizhi reserve.
On these lists
62.06779, 35.22355per Wikidata