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Veliki Ustyug
"From Vologda to Veliky Ustyug is half a thousand km. distance and most of the way the road goes in a deserted wilderness; even the communication towers are nowhere to be seen. A wide river, striking in its high, as in Siberia, banks. Endless woods. Good road ends, the speed drops to cycling. This is the only road connecting the city with the outside world. Ustyug is such an island city — a monument to the fragility of cultural and financial greatness, which in the context of great history have never been decisive. The ideal reason for melancholy, but being so far from the mainland, you feel not despondency, but a surge of energy. Not that the gravity of Moscow — Vologda and Arkhangelsk vibes are not to be felt here. By the 1917 there were about fifty churches and temples in Ustyug, and quite a large part survived, which in itself is incredible (so the distance still matters). The temple center of the city is called the "cathedral courtyard", which the language strives to change into a "gathering", since the churches stand one to the other like pushed together dishes. This is the most impressive architectural ensemble of the XVII century that I have ever seen. It is best to admire it from the opposite bank of the Sukhona. Then this view makes you forget about yourself and time. It is very rare that some Soviet or modern squalor does not fit into the frame of one landscape. The Ustyug Baroque cannot be confused with anything, five-domed temples raise domes like sails on masts. They are floating over the forest. Cartouches on facades are often compared to rolls of a nautical maps, and the temples themselves with double-deckers, although what kind of sailboats did Russian merchants have in the XVII century? What maps? Barges, stars. In this architecture there is more aspiration for the horizon, for the dream of wealth and fame, for a new good life. Before Peter I came to the Baltic, Ustyug was reputed to be the richest city in the North, and merchants were the movers of its progress. Enlightened in their travels, they decorated temples "according to what they had seen" in Moscow and Europe, especially since there were no strict rules then, but only the framework of tradition.