A very charming "treasure map" of the Nizhny Novgorod Region has appeared on the Sobaka.ru website

A very charming "treasure map" of the Nizhny Novgorod Region has appeared on the Sobaka.ru website. The map shows, in interactive form, the main centres of the region's folk crafts and decorative and applied arts, and is at the same time a chronicle of Russian craftsmanship.

Look closely, and the Nizhny Novgorod Region turns out to be a veritable Klondike: crystal and lace, painted wares and stone-carving, filigree and toys, embroidery and matryoshkas, knives and even guipure! I doubt that any other region could muster as many different ancestral crafts, and it would be interesting to test the thought against the actual figures. I like that we are witnessing how folk art, the fruit of the imagination, ingenuity and skill of our forebears, is returning to the everyday life of the modern person, and not only through the stalls of fairs and exhibitions, but through online projects like this one.

I remember how, as a child, travelling along the Golden Ring, I was surprised that of the traditional Russian crafts I saw only finift (enamel) and strings of red onions, and I wondered: where were all the other riches from the pages of the art-historical albums? But deep roots, as Tolkien wrote, are not reached by the frost. And here at last new shoots have appeared: the legendary Khokhloma, which, incidentally, was born precisely in the Nizhny Novgorod Region, and the smallest local crafts, of which perhaps you have never heard. What happiness it is to see that we are remembering our half-forgotten traditions, that from ethnographic texts, from old chests, from village memories they are being embodied in real life, developing and inspiring new achievements