balaxna.narod.ru is an unofficial website about Balakhna, a town on the Volga 34 kilometers northwest of Nizhny Novgorod[1]. In the nn.ru directory it was listed under the name "BALAKHNA"[2]. The site lived on a third-level domain in the narod.ru zone; the first snapshot in the web archive is dated April 4, 2002[1]. The footer of the main page carried a copyright notice of "2001–2002," and in later versions "2001–2010"[1][3]. In an early version the site introduced itself in English as "The Unoffical Website," with a misspelling of the word "unofficial"[1]; later the page title was corrected to "Welcome to the Unofficial Site of Balakhna"[3], but the misspelling survived in the page description: "The Unoffical Site of Balahna"[4].

What the site looked like

The top line was occupied by two indicators, the dollar exchange rate and the temperature: "Dollar exchange rate on April 4 — 31 rubles 19 kopecks," "Temperature in Balakhna: −4 C"[1]. The menu consisted of three sections: "History of Balakhna," "Working Balakhna," "Phone Numbers of Balakhna"[1]; by the 2011 snapshot a fourth had been added: "Radio Broadcasting"[3].

The main text of the home page was a short reference note about the town. As the home page put it, Balakhna is a landing on the Volga on the Nizhny Novgorod–Zavolzhye railway and the Nizhny Novgorod–Ivanovo highway, with 64,000 residents, the center of a district covering 0.9 thousand sq. km with 93,000 residents; first mentioned in 1536; its residents engaged in salt extraction and shipbuilding, and the lace and tile-making crafts became well known[1]. Among the landmarks it named the St. Nicholas Church of 1552, "one of the first tent-roofed stone structures," and the monument to K. Minin, for whom Balakhna is the birthplace; the 17th-century Pokrovskaya Church housed the state regional museum with a large exhibition on local folk crafts[1].

Industry was listed in a series: the Volga pulp and paper mill (OAO "Volga"), the Poligrafkarton pulp and cardboard production association, garment and furniture factories, the foundry and mechanical plant and the radio relay equipment plant (PZRA), and the Winter GOGRES power station[1]. The note ended by stating that Balakhna is counted among the historic towns of Russia[1].

No snapshots of the inner pages have survived; they are indirectly indicated by the keywords in the home page's markup: besides four spellings of the town's name (Балахна, Balaxna, Balahna, Balakhna), it lists the 17th-century Pokrovskaya Church, the Church of the Nativity of Christ of 1675, "Kartonnaya" (the cardboard mill), ZhDO, PZRA, Gogres, Pravdinsk, Ivan the Terrible, Elena Glinskaya, AO "Volga," Poligrafkarton, paper, cardboard.[1] The same set of keywords remained in the page's code more than twenty years later[4].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet

The Balakhna site's trace in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet is an entry in the nn.ru directory, in the "Volga Federal District" category of the "N. Novgorod and Nizhny Novgorod Government" section. On the category page saved on April 25, 2002, "БАЛАХНА" stood third of fifteen sites when sorted by rating: "Rating: 15.85," after the site "Governor 2001" (727) and the Nizhny Novgorod resource center "Childhood Without Violence and Cruelty" (33.85), ahead of Kstovo (13.46)[2]. The rating number was a link to the statistics page on Counter.nn.ru, where the site corresponded to number 2910[2]. In the same category, the Balakhna site's neighbors were the sites of Kstovo, Dzerzhinsk, and Arzamas[2]; the directory kept district resources together. It also appeared in a second category, "Local History Information," but there, in the snapshot of August 3, 2002, no rating is shown for it at all[5].

The catalog card described the project in its own words: "An unofficial site about the beautiful old town of BALAKHNA in Nizhny Novgorod Governorate… Also: a feed of the latest news, the current dollar exchange rate, a weather forecast"[2]. The exchange rate and weather really are on the surviving snapshots of the main page, but the menu has no separate news section[1][3]. The site does not appear among the results of the vote that concluded the 2004 Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet[6].

The Fate of the Address

At some point between 2002 and 2011, the site stopped being updated: the copyright notice froze at the year 2010[3]. Beginning with the snapshot of July 16, 2011, the top line shows the same values every time: "Dollar exchange rate as of June 4: 30 rubles 89 kopecks" and "Temperature in Balakhna: +20° C"[3]. Exactly the same text, down to the "2001–2010" copyright, appears in the snapshots of April 1, 2022[7], October 4, 2024[4], and April 25, 2026[8]: for a decade and a half, the page displayed a June dollar exchange rate and a June twenty degrees.

In the list of sites in the archival study of the counter.nn.ru rating, the project was listed as stalled, with lifespan years of 2002–2024 according to web archive snapshots; the last snapshot of the main page in the web archive is dated April 25, 2026, and shows the same unchanged page[8]. When checked in August 2026, the site at this address was responding.

Home page by year

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Volga Federal District" category, 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2011 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2024 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Local History Information" category, 2002 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, 2004 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Home page, 2022 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — Home page, 2026 (archive)