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Ukraine is home to a number of important cultural spaces and historic buildings, most of which date back many hundreds of years.
Among the historic sites are the centuries-old wooden churches, called tserkvas.
Like all timber architecture of Ukraine, the timber architecture of the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains, and particularly the elements of wooden church architecture, incorporates features that have survived since the Princely period in Ukraine's history. Even though the oldest preserved examples of wooden church architecture date back only to the 16th century, the basic features of this architecture are known from ancient chronicles and engravings, as well as from surviving Ukrainian stone churches dating back to the 11th and 12th centuries, which share many of the characteristic features of the local wooden architecture. Among these are: an organic relationship between external appearance and internal construction, a subordination of individual parts to the general ensemble, composition of shell with emphasis on the structure's silhouette, an absence of an accentuated facade as the main attraction, and, instead, an architectural composition that can be viewed from any vantage point. Ukrainian timber architecture is further characterized by a strict symmetry in plan composition, a clearly discernible coordination of roof forms, a building technique that defines the structure itself, the presence of arcades or galleries, wide eaves, and openings between the different parts of the building that unite the separate plan elements, and recesses in the design of roofs.
In spite of these general characteristics, numerous regional peculiarities evolved through the centuries, the result of differences in tribal traditions, climatic and geographic conditions, available building materials, and changing political and economic conditions. Nonetheless, regional variations involved, for the most part, only differences in proportion. This difference is most readily perceived in height, for, whereas, the builders of the central regions of Ukraine strove to defy the plain's monotony by building to the skies, those of the mountains felt no urge to compete with nature's heights. Hence, the silhouette of many Carpathian churches resembles a cascade of narrow horizontal bands, while those of the plains, with their elongated drums, give the appearance of colossal, slender towers, rising some 30- 35 meters in the sky.
Over the centuries, the master builders of this region learned to create original architectural and artistic forms that manifest an organic unity of functional, structural and artistic conceptions, thereby attaining the highest artistic levels while using the simplest means.
To a large extent, all displayed the traditional features of Ukrainian timber architecture, and especially its Carpathian variant: the characteristic solid timber structural system, a variety of roof forms, cantilevered galleries, wide eaves supported by brackets or consoles, porches, different techniques of board sheathing, and a great number of shingle designs.
In contrast to the wooden architecture of Western Europe, in which post-and- beam construction predominated, the structural system used in Ukrainian timber architecture consisted almost exclusively of a layered solid-timber technique known as "blockwork" or the "log-cabin" style of building (zrub in Ukrainian). This technique relied on placing timbers horizontally in successive layers and jointing them at the corners to form load-bearing walls. The wooden structures built on this horizontal principle consisted of separate, nearly square, hexagonal or octagonal units (klit, klity), which were the basic structural and planning modules of most wooden buildings of Ukraine, their proportions governed only by the dimensions of available building materials.
Thus a characteristic feature of this type of wooden architecture is that the total interior space, including the interior space of roofs and towers, corresponds exactly to their exterior. There are no false ceilings, no internal columns, no diagonal braces to strengthen towers, some of which reach formidable heights. Their construction is unique in that the shell of the building is at the same time its own structural support.
The old master builders worked with great skill and imagination, producing numerous variations on basic building plans and structural and decorative details. All the principal elements of construction designed for specific purposes, such as projecting roof beams, roof ridges and eaves, gallery posts and braces, door and window frames, were made part of the total architectural composition and were often decorated with ornamental carvings.
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Ukrainian Wooden Churches - Zakarpattia Region | Architecture Enthusiast |
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