Kizhi Pogost

22 wooden domes, and no nails in the frame

Kizhi Pogost stands on a low hill at the southern end of Kizhi, a small island in Lake Onega in the Republic of Karelia, inside a log fence about 300 metres long that defends nothing: it marks holy ground off from the world outside. Within it stand two wooden churches and a bell tower set in a triangle, the only surviving ensemble in Russia with two many-domed wooden churches, according to UNESCO, which listed it in 1990. Churches on the island appear in chronicles of the 16th century. Lightning burned them in 1693, and the present ones rose on the same site.

The Church of the Transfiguration is the summer church, unheated, used when the faithful came in from the far edges of the parish. The cross inside records that its altar was laid on 6 June 1714, and tree-ring dating puts the building after 1713. Its 22 domes climb in tiers to 37 metres, one of the tallest wooden buildings in northern Europe, and inside, under a vault known as the heaven, a gilded iconostasis holds 102 icons. The builders' names are lost, and the legend fills the gap. Master Nestor, the story goes, built it with a single axe and no nails, and when it was done he threw the axe into the lake, saying there never was and never would be another to match it. The frame is nail-free, made of axe-cut pine logs about 30 cm thick, scribed to fit and locked at the corners with round notches or dovetails. The roofs are another matter: some 180,000 nails hold their 60,000 shingles.

The Church of the Intercession is the winter church, heated, holding services from 1 October until Easter. It began in 1694 with one dome and was rebuilt in 1764 with nine, 27 metres high, as an echo of its taller neighbour. The bell tower, 30 metres high, dates in its present form from 1862.

In the 19th century the churches were boarded over and painted white and their domes sheeted in metal; a restoration of 1949 to 1959 brought back the old look. Services stopped from 1937 to 1994. In 1980 to 1983 a steel frame went inside the Transfiguration Church to hold it up, and its iconostasis came out. The later restoration, more than ten years of work, numbered and photographed every log, took the church apart in stages, replaced only pieces more than half destroyed, about 30 percent of the whole, with Karelian pine felled in winter, and put it back with the old joints. Some experts argued that each dismantling costs a monument some of its history. The Kizhi open-air museum runs the site, and a fire crew stands guard.