About the Project

2007 — A Business Trip to Engels

In the hot, dusty summer of 2007, I spent a week on a work assignment in Engels, a city in Saratov Oblast. The job was light and wrapped up around four each day, but summer days are long. The only museum I found in the city — devoted to the children's writer Lev Kassil — closed at three, so my cultural program for the week became wandering around with a camera in search of anything remotely interesting.

I literally walked for miles through that Engels of mine, camera in hand. There was nothing to photograph. Mostly out of boredom, I started shooting the painted shutters on the old wooden houses. The residents had been extravagant with paint, and you'd sometimes come across the most outlandish color combinations. In the end, I came home with about a hundred photographs of nalichniki (Russia's carved ornamental window frames).

Something became clear to me then: a collage of thirty-two nalichniki laid out in a grid tells you far more than a single nalichnik on its own. Without any expertise in architecture or anything else, an unprepared viewer — more or less all of us — can take in the look and feel of an entire city at a glance.

A month later, in July, came a cycling trip through Yaroslavl Oblast, and what a surprise — the nalichniki of Rostov the Great were utterly unlike the ones in Engels!

I won't pretend it was still accidental this time: I photographed them systematically, house by house, trying to work out what they shared and where they differed... which my traveling companions hated me for :) More cities followed that same year — Chelyabinsk, Dmitrov, Kazan, Cheboksary, Izhevsk... And then three more years, during which the collection grew whenever chance allowed...

2010 — The Website is Born

The collection had outgrown LiveJournal — which back then was the only social network there was.

No sooner said than done. It took me six months to build the site, and in November 2010 I registered the domain Nalichniki.com, which was miraculously still available. I put everything online. A couple of days later the phone rang. Ivan, would it be possible to buy some of your nalichniki photographs for photo wallpaper?...

Why on earth not? Let's meet. We met, we talked. Maria turned out to be a doctor working for a British cancer charity. Because her work kept her in Europe for long stretches, she wanted something warm and traditionally Russian at home — though not matryoshkas, something different, more domestic, more rooted in folk culture...

That's how the idea of nalichniki photo wallpaper was born. And in the same conversation another idea came up: a calendar, with a different city every month. Not just any calendar — white nalichniki for winter, colorful for spring, green for summer, yellow and brown for autumn... Maria mentioned at some point who would be receiving them, but I was only half listening. After New Year's 2011, I learned that about fifteen of my calendars had been presented to Nobel laureates around the world. I still can't quite believe it.

2011 — First Publications

That winter I was tracked down by postcard collectors who practically forced me to make nalichniki postcards! Oddly enough, nobody had done it before — though what could be simpler, with wooden houses in nearly every Russian city. A designer materialized from somewhere, laid out the cards, and was enormously helpful with the look of that first set. By May — just three months after the first release — we put out a second set, which scattered itself around the world just as quickly.

Then came summer, new expeditions, thousands more photographs — now sorted and catalogued, though not yet shown to the world...

August brought an unexpected turn. An interview I gave to the magazine Sobesednik caught the attention of a film crew from VGIK, the Russian State Film School. On my very next trip — to Ivanovo Oblast — they came along: me doing what I always do, and them there to shoot a short documentary about the collection and how it comes together.

2012–2014 — Expeditions

Slowly, over five years — by January 2012 — the collection had gathered nalichniki from 53 cities across more than twenty regions. More trips followed, more postcards, even nalichniki coloring books... By the winter of 2014 I had 101 cities behind me and more than six thousand photographs. The collection had nearly doubled in a year and a half — thanks to a crowdfunding campaign and to the many people who chose to believe in the project.

2014–2019 — The Book

In the summer of 2014 I launched a fundraising effort to publish the first book ever devoted to that remarkable phenomenon, the Russian nalichnik. More than a thousand people believed in it, and work began in earnest: dozens of expeditions, hundreds of cities, thousands more photographs — until at last, in 2019, Nalichniki: Central Russia saw the light of day. But the moment it did, it was obvious a second volume was necessary — about the nalichniki of the Volga region. It's still in development; I won't tempt fate, but I expect we'll see it around 2028 or 2029.

From 2020 — Assembly Kits

In the meantime, since 2020, nalichniki can be put together as model kits — assembled and used to decorate your home. An unexpected way to fund the project's growth, but it turned out to be exactly the right one.