The Villages Pulled Out in Time

The Villages Pulled Out in Time

The log in front of you remembers two rivers. First, the Ilim. Its bank now lies underwater. And finally, this bank of the Angara, twenty kilometers from Lake Baikal. The log was taken apart, hauled hundreds of kilometers, and put back together. It was never meant to survive until today.

The Taltsy museum wasn't created for tourists. It's a by-product of the biggest infrastructure project of the Soviet era: a chain of hydroelectric dams on this very river. The Bratsk and Ust-Ilimsk power stations needed reservoirs, and reservoirs swallowed the land along the banks. Dozens of villages, with their churches, forts and barns, were going under the water. The decision to build a museum of folk architecture was made in nineteen sixty-six. The first visitors walked in in nineteen eighty.

The most important thing brought here is what remains of the Ilim stockade fort. Look at the Spasskaya gate tower. It was built in sixteen sixty-seven. Next to it stands the Kazan Church, from sixteen seventy-nine. The fort stood on the Ilim River. It was one of the outposts of the Russian push into Eastern Siberia, toward the Lena River. When the Ust-Ilimsk reservoir began to fill, the tower and the church were taken apart and carried out to this place. A seventeenth-century tower standing on dry ground today is the result of a rescue operation, not a happy accident.

Look at the height of the doorsteps in these izbas, the peasant log houses. Look at the type of stove, at the way the windows are cut into the logs. All of it is a chronicle you can read. Every log house here is a home where people lived until the water reached the doorstep.

Taltsy isn't a monologue about Russian Siberia. The museum is built as a story told in four voices. There are Russian, Buryat, Evenk and Tofalar zones, side by side, like the cultures that lived next to each other around Baikal for centuries. In the Buryat zone, you'll find yurts. In the Evenk camp, there are chums, their conical tents, and narty, sleds, along with hunting and shamanic scenes. The indigenous peoples of the taiga, the great northern forest, are equal participants in a shared history.

In nineteen ninety-five, Taltsy received the status of a historical and cultural heritage site of federal significance. The museum covers about seventy hectares. It's open all year round, and it keeps growing. A hydropower project that flooded dozens of living villages gave rise to an institution that now keeps their memory.

The villages drowned. But a few dozen log houses were pulled out in time. Now they stand here, beside the river whose dams raised that water.

Ask me about the Ilim fort, and that becomes your tour.

What should we tell you about? Your own street would do. moygid dot online.