Parallel worlds

The anniversary of Russian statehood attracts to Izborsk monsters of architecture and improvement

At this hour, the problems of preservation (in fact - salvation of appearance) of the historical Vorovskaya Street Izborsk, part of which, without coordination with state bodies of the protection of monuments, were hastily prepared for rough asphalt coating more than a meter high. Even the State Committee of the Pskov Region for Culture sets the conditions for preserving the historical landscape and the traditional bridge across the Smolka River. Not all dangers are allotted from another reserved historical corner. But other troubles are expected by Izborsk, more precisely, it will be said to be nonsense if the projects become reality.

Izborsk. Lukovka tower. Descent. Photo by S. M. Morozov, May 1964. The place of the alleged stone staircase.

According to the repair project st. Vorovskaya, performed a year ago, a new bridge across the tar was to combine concrete slopes with three monstrous (already purchased!) Metal pipes, where they planned to drive a five -meter river. Much more must be changed in the project murderous for Izborsk, so as not to ruin the historical street leading directly to the museum zone, to the medieval fortress walls, and the materials are already wrapped and the construction equipment is idle and the workers are waiting ...

And the contractor, who received the “ready -made project”, curses the day and hour when he believed this whole system and wanted to do a good thing - to improve the living conditions of the Delivery from Vorovskaya Street.

At the same time, another global, on the scale of Izborsk, is waiting for the project for the improvement of the main tourist routes of the State Museum-Reserve "Izborsk". The project was developed by StroyCenter LLC (St. Petersburg) in September 2011 (in one month!), The cost of design work is 2 million 275 thousand 680 rubles.

Use without preserving

The improvement of the tourist routes of Izborsk is still available only in the design-paper version (M Unicipal Contract No. 157-A/2011 dated September 5, 2011 - Auth. ). But now the next road-building organization, which honestly won the competition, will deploy its construction sites along familiar tourist paths, the “improvement” of which is provided for by the project.

The project of the site for relaxation with information signs in Izborsk. The project of LLC "Stroyproekt" (St. Petersburg).

Like the project of repairing Verovskaya Street, the project “Registration” of tourist routes of Izborsk was not agreed upon by the State Committee of the Pskov Region for Culture. The technical task is a very abstract draft of desires, probably a museum-reserve, while not attention is attention to the fact that the designer is proposed to pay the main attention to the use of the landscape (and by no means its preservation). Although intentions are like good, because tourists should walk along smooth paths, and not trample the reserved grass.

The main scourge of all technical tasks of the last time for designing in the territories of cultural heritage objects is an inversion of ideas about protected objects. Already at the design stage, it is proposed not to adapt to the long -existing objects of heritage (and thereby preserve them as much as possible), but to turn this legacy inside out, squeeze, change, distort, but take everything we want from it.

Such an understanding in the use of a cultural heritage, whether it is a separate building, or a valuable territory, is characteristic of many "landscaping" projects.

The adaptation of historical and cultural monuments is given to arbitrariness to organizations that have no experience in this difficult sphere, but having a freshly baked license for the right of such work.

It also makes some transcendent absurdity from the conditions for this work: the terms of a particular, many-quality design, including approval-a few days. It seems that customers - both metropolitan and local - seriously believe that a computer can think instead of people. For some reason, they themselves are preparing competitive documentation for many months: it is clear that no technique can help them. Or are the tasks of customers completely different?

It is necessary to draw the attention of the reader to the hypnotic word "tourism" and its derivatives. Maybe there are still romantics that understand the word tourism as some trips and campaigns in unknown lands, to exotic landscapes, bonfires or guest houses ...

However, an increasing number of people begin to understand that tourism is just a business and an organization of mass consumption. Everything else is packaging for a people requiring bread (cafes, restaurants, pancakes) and spectacles (landscapes, benches, sometimes even fountains). In order for the tourism business to go more successfully, all the conditions are created, including unacceptable history and culture monuments: they asphalt roads, put on bridges, build stone stairs with railings.

Like any socio-economic phenomenon, business and consumption can work for good and evil.

Flight of stairs

I walked along the lane / along the avenue
Like scissors steps / like paper
I pierce it / walks someone
In broad daylight / on the contrary, in the darkness.
Joseph Brodsky, 1960s.

If, figuratively speaking, walking along the paper paths of the project for the improvement of the main tourist routes of the State Museum-Reserve "Izborsk", then there is a clear feeling of parallelism of the worlds.

The project of the information stand in Izborsk. The project of LLC "Stroyproekt" (St. Petersburg).

The project includes all the necessary documentation, and if the tourist trails were created, say, in a clean field, as a park of culture and rest of workers, then perhaps nostalging citizens would not have noticed anything. But for Izborsk, designers create, while on paper, a world of malignant virtual illusions.

I must say right away: the designers of StroyCenter LLC do not offer anything new in the development of tourist routes, make no discoveries and do not look at the Izborsk landscapes with an unbiased look. They have several standard schemes of museum routes (also ordinary, wiped, in which all hope is on the bright personality of the guide and the stunning look of the Izborsky valleys), and the designers, as obedient performers, fulfill the command: to improve it.

As they understand and arrange: for the convenience of tourists, every familiar descent and climbing the hillocks are equipped with stone stairs with metal fences.

So, according to the plan of LLC StroyCenter, a trail that easily hugs the slope of the mountain of the mountain at the Lukovka tower, on the familiar path to Slovenian keys, turns into a stepped descent. The picturesque and quite gentle bend of the oldest road from the Talavsky tower to the keys (past the guest house) is also equipped with a wide stone staircase on a concrete base. Stone steps will lead you from Slovenian keys to the bridges of Lake Gorodishchensky.

The rise to Trudovorov Gorodishch from the lake is also helpfully provided with stairwells with sites. With each staircase - a powerful, reliable iron fence with a height of 0.9 m - this is supposed to be building codes for low -mobility groups of the population. A similar fence is given to the landscape where the stairs are not at all designed, for example, along the descent to the Slovenian keys, on the way to them, as well as along the shrub, when exiting the Gorodishchensky plateau.

Izborsk. The descent from the chapel in the name of the Korsunsky Mother of God on the street. School. The place of the alleged stone staircase on a concrete base. Photo: Vladimir Nikitin

The apotheosis of the stairs in the project can serve as a multiple, but already wooden staircase from the shore of Lake Gorodishchensky to the lake plateau. But this path should start from Slovenian keys equipped with benches. At the same time, it is quite in the spirit of the project, it is planned to throw several more simple reinforced concrete jumpers through a peppy stream so as not to jump through the stream of water.

In addition, in reinforced concrete, it is supposed to strengthen the ruins of the old mill and arrange a fenced species on a concrete ruin. It is interesting that the measurements of the ruins in the technical task are not spelled out, which means that the mill after concreting will become unrecognizable. And why then will it even need a tourist?

Further, from this species mill, our path is planned along narrow, wooden bridges laid on the screw piles firmly inserted into the lake soil. The alleged crowds of tourists, bypassing the coastal line of the Lake Gorodishchensky (having scared away water livestock and birds for a long time, depriving them of nesting), are chosen to the very, stunning, steep, but safe staircase, closed on two sides with high fences of primitive drawing. The pile of structures on a natural slope should symbolize the victory of human owing and concrete over wildlife.

However, in museum conditions, a person also cannot be given free rein, even on the Izborsk plains. To manage the flow of excursionists, the project is proposed to create a strict framework of pedestrian paths.

Izborsk. A trail with a plateau over the Gorodishchensky lake on Trudovorovo Gorodishche. The place of the alleged stone staircase. Photo: Vladimir Nikitin

The worst is not planned: routes are laid on existing paths and are filled not with asphalt, but by special mixture on a crushed stone base. The upper layer of soil is removed for their device, sometimes up to 45 cm, and in the places of protrusions of the natural cliff it is covered with soil, aligning the paths for "intensive operation by a large number of pedestrian groups." The main paths, paths, trodden by pilgrims, but not flooded, living, are driven into standard dimensions of 1.5-2 m, complemented by blinding and called upon to serve those guiding threads, from which it will not be possible to deviate, even if you want.

It can be understood that for the museum-reserve, the issues of operating the territory are of great importance. The museum space is the same exhibit as a clothing fund, also requires care and is quickly amortized with a “large number of pedestrian groups”. But this is - the work of the museum, and not an inn in the village.

For what tourists are deprived of labor to climb along a winding, as in antiquity, on the hillfort, to remember these layered stones of the original Izborsk cliff, to understand why this place was chosen for the settlement and life? Why should the Epic Izborsky landscape, by the will of our contemporary intelligent, should be cut through with rigid lines of paths, zigzags of concrete stairwells, iron -barking iron?

And the answer is simple-we exist in parallel worlds, where some see the living, while others see something else.

In informational delirium

But not all the time to trample on the stairs of Izborsk, you must give the soul and body rest. For this, special places are allocated in the landscaping project, for example, a former trading track to Slovenian Key. It is improved by a wide, raised above a pedestrian path, a platform with evenly placed benches, separated by "green spaces" (decorative bushes).

Izborsk. The hill above the Gorodishchensky Lake. The place of the alleged wooden staircase. Photo: Vladimir Nikitin

From the side of the spray, the site is fenced with the same metal fence that is set throughout this tourist route. Two powerful information shields are exhibited on the sides of the landing site, apparently for the symmetry of the composition.

Interestingly, in the terms of reference, it is ordered to reclamate the flooded, erased to the cliff, the territory of the trading zone. But the introduction of a new function here is not provided, as well as the creation of a passing city square.

The intellectual and information part of the project involves the extraordinary saturation of the protected landscape with stands, shields, signs. They are made in artistic images, familiar from the sweet pictures of Russian folk tales, sometimes with elements of modern (in the spirit of book illustrations of the beginning of the 20th century), sometimes it is simpler and cheaper.

These log, chopped and planned wooden structures, reaching a height of three meters, are proposed to be installed in the most valuable, characteristic points of the Izborsk landscapes, as if monuments to themselves during life. Roughly shaken, like huge pencils, poles of pointers and benches, carved towels and hairstyles, copied immediately from the North and Nizhny Novgorod, long-lost, hut profiles, stands of the stands of wooden cemetery halls (crosses)-this is not the entire list of techniques and techniques with which the designers of the capital's St. Petersburg surprise us, surprise us, surprise us. Provincials from the Pskov hinterland.

On foreign tourists, this "Old Russian" cranberries are also designed to make an indelible impression. Instead of photographs of the Izborsko-Malsky Valley and the Lake surface, the grass road from Truvorov settlement marked with ruts, you will receive a civilian picture with information stands or a pointed column with spinning grounds in the foreground. And there will be not a piece of the landscape, free from this intrusive infobred.

The features of the project noted by us, designed to “ennoble” the ancient spaces of Izborsk, are far from everything that is laid down in the volumes of documentation of 2011 manufacturing. When, by the will of the customer (GU “Office of the Capital Construction of the Pskov Region”), these volumes were provided for the examination of the Pskov branch of the Institute “Special Project Strests”, the project did not receive a positive conclusion. It was proposed to remove about 70% of the innovations from the project, if only because they do not meet the requirements of regional legislation on the protection of protected, historical landscapes and a natural monument. However, the customer did not need to change the project, but a positive conclusion from the examination. It was not given. That's the point.

One hope is that by the 1150th anniversary of the Russian statehood, the Izborsk historical landscape will no longer have time to mutilate, and then there will be no financing for these delights. That will be saved.

Without homeland, without calling

From the school years, each generation of Pskovichs is related to Izborsk, and thanks to those schools and teachers who, without noise and bustle, take their guys here, to the ancient fortress, and to the Slovenian Klyuchs, and to the old town. A low bow to those teachers who lead students from Izborsk to the Small through the village of Brod, talk (do not give lectures!) About the waters of the local lakes and springs, about a clearing with wild orchids on the shore of the River Skhodes, about alpine anemons and colonies of rare mosses growing on the stones of the Izborsky paths. It is important not classic mental knowledge, but a momentary sensation, a heartfelt impression - it is they who remain for life.

Izborsk. The road near the Trivorov city in the village of Brody. It is supposed to cover with a gravel-duct mixture, expansion up to 3 meters. Photo: Vladimir Nikitin

Izborsk - its own, native place that is not comparable to others. Great happiness for us is the opportunity to come to Izborsk when pulling there. And as a secret, personal ritual - to go to all these shrines, to familiar stones and waters, to feel in the literal sense of the word.

I will explain for pragmatists who respect only dry lexical terminology without any lyrics there: the natural landscapes of Izborsk cause people a sense of national self -identification. And not only among Russians, among Europeans - too. Because our origins of cultures are common.

But, as life has shown, there are always people who have surprisingly stable immunity to both the national and the self -identification component. On such, Boris Stepanovich Skobeltsyn put a furious stigma: “They have no homeland, they have no calling!”.

Now such people have come to Izborsk.

Irina Golubeva,
Chairman of the Pskov Regional Branch of the All -Russian Society for the Protection of Monuments of History and Culture, member of the Public Chamber of the Pskov Region