Poludomok (stress on the second "o"): a type of house common in the Nizhny Novgorod Volga region, in which the lower floor is brick and the upper floor is wooden.
The lower, unheated floor of the poludomok is called the kladovaya, or storeroom. It serves both as a kind of tall foundation and as a utility room where belongings and provisions are kept. In summer the cool storeroom was often used as a bedroom.
The Vorotynets poludomoks
In the settlement of Vorotynets, several poludomoks stand on Svoboda Street.
Among them stands out a large five-walled poludomok with four windows along its façade, which in the early 20th century belonged to the merchant Mikhail Vasilyevich Simonov. The scale of his trade is shown by the fact that, besides his own shop, he also rented the ground floor of a building from the merchant Ryabov, already familiar to us. It was in this very building that the first meeting of the Vorotynets communists took place in 1918. Today it houses the district military commissariat.
In 1899 the five-walled Sofyin poludomok was built. Before the revolution the owner of the house was Fyodor Valeryevich Sofyin, an accountant by profession. At that time there were few such professionals in Vorotynets, so Fyodor Valeryevich's work was well paid, and the Sofyin family lived in prosperity.
The house of Pyotr Zubov, the former owner of the Vorotynets market, draws attention with the beauty of its decoration. A great master of joinery, Zubov adorned his house with beautiful carved window surrounds and a valance made in the technique of openwork carving, also called cut-through, or fretwork, carving.
Such carving is also often called lace-like, because of its outward resemblance to lace. Its elements have no background as such and often no interior areas within the figures — all of this is cut out (hence the name, from "cutting through") with a fretsaw or a saw. Rows of toothed and stepped ornaments decorated window surrounds and house pediments, and also framed doorways above entrances, staircase railings, and porch cornices.
Russian peasant dwellings combined practicality with extraordinary beauty. Various architectural details carried a certain symbolic meaning (an ancient protective, or talisman, function) while at the same time playing a decorative role. For instance, the need to cover the gaps that inevitably appear between a house's log wall and a window frame gave rise to window surrounds, which decorate the house and serve as a kind of boundary between it and the outside world. And boundaries must have their own protection — this is where protective signs and ornaments come to the rescue. Passing by such windows, it was impossible to "cast the evil eye" on their owners. Look at the beautiful window surrounds and cornice valances, and try to decipher the hidden meaning built into them. The techniques of openwork carving are very simple and less labour-intensive, which is why it has been widespread since ancient times, especially in the decoration of wooden houses.
Not far away stands another house, also richly decorated with carving. This time, however, it is solid relief carving. It is sometimes known by another name — "ship" or "vessel" carving — since it was used to decorate the bows and sides of wooden Volga vessels. Ship carving reached its highest flowering in the villages of hereditary Volga carpenters, who honed the art of decorating vessels from generation to generation. In the 19th century, with the advent of the steam fleet, ship carvers turned to decorating buildings.
As artistic skill grew and the pattern became more elaborate, this carving acquired greater ornamental splendour, matching the aspirations of the well-to-do peasant elite to set their houses apart from the other buildings of the village through the richness of their decoration. That is why the most accomplished examples of carving from its period of flowering are found on the dwellings of prosperous peasants, who built especially actively in the post-reform era.
Such is the house built in 1877. The people of Vorotynets most often call it, after the family name of its owners, the Sergeyev house.
The wooden upper part of the house is built of thick logs and set upon a stone storeroom. The house's pediment is richly decorated with carving. A floral ornament is woven into a complex composition. On the left, on the frontal board, is placed the date the house was built — the year 1877. The pediment is filled, in clear sequence and symmetry, with a rich floral ornament. Carved into the thick board are alternating large chamomile flowers and four-leaf motifs. In the centre of the pediment is a triple carved light-room window.