Architectural Ensemble of the Chekuyevsky Pogost on the Onega River

Abstract

The article focuses on a remarkable complex of wooden buildings of the Chekuyevsky Pogost of the Onezhsky Uyezd of the Arkhangelsk Province. In the early 20th century, the ensemble consisted of four edifices – three churches and a bell tower, a rarest case in the history of northern wooden architecture. New archival sources on temple construction history in Chekuyevo were identified, the building history of the objects of research was revealed, their architecture was analyzed in historical and typological aspects. As a result, the value and significance of the church ensemble in Chekuyevo in the context of the history of wooden architecture in the Russian North was established. The Preobrazhenskaya (1687) and an older Sretenskaya Churches (1677) play an important role in the understanding of the phenomenon of cube-shaped temples; the Uspenskaya Church (1675) with its unusual domed octagonal top sheds more light on the existence of this unusual form in the Russian North, apparently borrowed from the central and southern provinces. The preserved corpus of archival written and graphic sources concerning the erection of the new Sretenskaya Church in 1892-1894 according to the project of architect E. Krausp enables us to reconstruct in detail the specific features of the organization of the construction process and consider this building in a broader context of temples erected according to a similar project in other uyezds (counties) of the Arkhangelsk Province. The analyzed amount of data allows us to unravel its lengthy construction history of the original Chekuyevsky complex and highlight the fundamental importance of the Chekyevo ensemble for Russian wooden architecture as a whole.