Baroque in the Middle of the Forest

One of the houses on the main square of Lalsk is still known to locals as the Chinese House. Just an ordinary wooden building, painted, unremarkable — but the nickname isn't a joke or a local legend. There's a real story behind it: merchants here traded along a chain that ran through Veliky Ustyug, through Arkhangelsk, through endless forest roads — and at the far end of that chain waited Chinese tea, Chinese silk, Chinese furs. Lalsk wasn't the final stop. It was a junction, a staging post at what looks today like the edge of the world, but was once a busy trading crossroads.

These days the town has about two and a half thousand people. But there was a time when, along this small river, the Lala, so many stone churches stood that they'd have been enough for a good-sized regional capital.

Take the Resurrection Cathedral. It was built between sixteen ninety-eight and seventeen sixteen — almost twenty years of work. Five domes, glazed tiles, baroque flourishes on top: this isn't village church architecture, this is the same Ustyug-Stroganov baroque style you'd find in Veliky Ustyug and Totma. Next to it stands the Annunciation Church, the "winter" one, finished by seventeen sixty-one. And then the bell tower — tiered, tall, visible from the fields and from the river. Trading caravans once used it to find their way across those fields. Today, it still works as a landmark — just for us instead.

Within ten to fifteen kilometers around town, there's a whole ring of churches. The Intercession Church near Zaborye, built around seventeen forty. The Transfiguration Church in Sloboda, seventeen forty-eight to seventeen fifty-four. The Nativity Church in Uchka, seventeen seventy-three. The Assumption cemetery church, from the seventeen-nineties. It's an unbroken chain of stone standing in the forest. Picture it: a small trading town that could afford to scatter expensive stone buildings across dozens of kilometers around it — almost as if marking its territory with its own wealth.

There's a darker note in this story too. The Savior Church on the square, built in seventeen eighty-seven, baroque in style, was turned into a dormitory under Soviet rule. From the outside now, it just looks like an ordinary house. People lived inside an eighteenth-century church, children played where the altar once stood — without knowing it. This isn't a figure of speech. It happened, to one specific building, on one specific street.

Lenin Street here runs just three kilometers end to end. Along those three kilometers: old trading arcades, a wooden district administration building, grand merchants' houses, a museum inside the former Pryanishnikov house. And at the far end, a suspension bridge over the Lala. It sways underfoot — and that, in a way, is the most honest symbol of how Lalsk holds itself together: caught between its baroque past and its present, between two and a half thousand residents and an age when people here built to last centuries.

Today, the Intercession Church near Zaborye is being saved by a restorer named Igor Noskov and a small group of volunteers — weekend work parties, fundraising, basic preservation. No government program, no tourist crowds. Just a handful of people who drive out to the forest and work with their hands. Against a town of two and a half thousand people, it feels like something close to a small miracle of stubbornness.

Lalsk is quiet. The air smells of pine resin and cool river water. The baroque domes reflect in the Lala just as they did three hundred years ago — and there's something strange, almost unsettling about it: the sense that time here hasn't stopped, just slowed down to a walking pace.

Ask me about the Intercession Church near Zaborye — the one standing almost swallowed by forest above the Luza River. There's a detail in its decoration that keeps drawing restorers back, again and again, and I'm still not entirely sure anyone has fully explained where it came from…

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