The Silver Domes of Kizhi Are Made of Weed Wood

Picture a lake so wide you can't see the far shore. Lake Onega, in the north of Russia. On an island in it stand twenty-two domes. From the water they look silver. They flash in the sun like the scales of a fish.

Most visitors guess metal. Lead, maybe, or tin. Surely nobody would spare anything on a wonder like this. But it's aspen. The cheapest, most stubborn tree in the northern forest. The villagers had a name for it: a weed tree.

The easy explanation is poverty. Poor builders, so they used whatever was lying around. Except it doesn't hold up. Aspen was chosen for these roofs even where pine grew nearby, and larch, and spruce. So it wasn't poverty. The carpenters of these villages knew something about this tree that most of us have forgotten.

The roofing is called lemekh. It's a small wooden scale, about the size of your palm, with a curved notch cut into the bottom. Scales like this cover the onion-shaped domes. One dome of the Transfiguration Church on Kizhi takes several thousand of them. The whole church takes more than thirty thousand. Each one is held by a single forged nail. Each one is cut by hand, with an axe.

Here's the first part of the answer. Fresh aspen is soft. It cuts almost like butter. In a day a carpenter can make as many scales from aspen as he'd manage from oak or larch in a week. Aspen hardly splits along the grain. It keeps its shape, so you can cut any curve you like, and it won't crack in a hard frost.

And it's light. The dome of that church rises as high as a seven-storey building. Dress it in oak shingles and the whole structure would simply crush itself. Aspen weighs about three times less. The log walls carry it without a single extra post inside.

Now the surprising part. Aspen fears damp. Leave it in the ground, or low in a wall near the soil, and it rots in ten years or so. People called it a rotten tree. But up high, in the wind, it behaves the other way round.

When rain hits, the wood swells. The scales press tight against each other, and the dome becomes one solid skin. Water can't get through. It just runs down. Then it dries, the gaps open a little, and the wood breathes.

And after a few years in sun and wind, the aspen changes colour. The thin top layer fades to a silvery grey, so much like metal that people mistake it. On a cloudy day the dome looks dull, like lead. At sunset it flares pink and gold. At noon it shines like real silver. No other northern wood does this trick. Pine goes nearly black. Spruce turns brown.

The scales were cut with a special axe. Short, with a broad, rounded blade. People simply called it the lemekh axe. The saw was avoided on purpose. A saw tears the fibres, and water gets into the tear. An axe does the opposite. It presses the fibres down and closes the pores. After the axe, an aspen scale comes out almost polished, with a tiny crust of compressed wood. That crust is what turns rain away, year after year.

Who first worked this out, nobody knows. The carpenters passed the craft from hand to hand and left no drawings. There is a lovely legend, though. It says one master, called Nestor, built the Transfiguration Church, and when he finished, he threw his axe into the lake and said: there was never one like this, and there never will be. Historians don't believe it. One man can't raise a church that size. But whoever those carpenters of Zaonezhye were, they left us something that still works.

A single aspen scale lasts thirty to forty years. Then it's replaced. In the last century, the roofing on this church was renewed twice. The latest time was a great restoration that ran for eleven years and ended only recently. Thirty-four thousand new scales, every one cut with an axe, the way it was done three centuries ago.

So the silver over Lake Onega isn't metal, and it isn't paint. It's a tree people thought was worthless. It turned out to last the longest, and to look the finest. Sometimes the best material is the one everyone walks past.

Anything at all — a building, a word, a habit you never questioned. moygid dot online.