A person spoiled by modern civilization, when thinking of a “city,” will immediately picture broad streets with cars rushing in several lanes, glossy shopping malls, and anthill apartment blocks “for ten thousand flats.” Everything else he will contemptuously label a village. But that is simply the взгляд of a blinkered and shallow subject who does not know the country he lives in—or its history.
Legendary Sol Galitskaya, founded in the 14th century, in the dark Middle Ages, on the lands of the Merya—the “white-eyed Chud”—and now home to just over five thousand people, is a town of an entirely different kind from today’s megacities.
Its splendid low-rise fabric—mostly private houses—seems to reach back almost to the 18th century, and not even seventy years of Soviet power managed to spoil it. An abandoned Resurrection Monastery, picturesquely set on the bank of the Kostroma River; the “beheaded” Church of St Nicholas the Wonderworker; the inactive Church of the Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem; wooden торговые rows with “capital-city” shop names like Loft or Major; earthen ramparts left from an old wooden fortress—all of it forms a single, coherent picture.
Here everyone knows everyone, and every new face draws attention; smoke pours from chimneys on all sides—Soligalich residents heat their homes. And yet this is clearly not a village: it is a real old Russian town—small, provincial, a bit backwater. One imagines that, with some modern conveniences, it was much the same a hundred years ago.
Why did it happen this way—why did Soligalich freeze, falling (to our delight) into a centuries-long suspended animation? Perhaps because this place is, in practice, a lived-in dead end of Kostroma land, surrounded by taiga thickets. There are no major roads to the east or west—only dirt tracks leading to dying villages. To the north, toward Vologda Oblast, there is a winter road, which, by local accounts, doesn’t even function in early December and can be handled only by a serious off-road vehicle.
Despite a couple of traffic lights, an Ozon pickup point, a “Magnit” and a “Pyaterochka,” (Ozon — a Russian e-commerce marketplace / pickup point network, Pyaterochka and Magnit — major Russian retail chain supermarkets)
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and a monument to the ubiquitous god VIL (VIL — Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)), everything here—the houses, the people, the unhurried rhythm—creates an atmosphere that’s hard to put into words of the provinces: in many ways enigmatic and mystical. The feeling doesn’t leave you that you have stepped into a distant past.
Cars roll by, but the imagination draws “ikotnitsy” screaming somewhere behind the windows of these old houses (ikotnitsy — women believed to be possessed / afflicted by “ikota” (a folk notion of possession; “screaming fits”)); or it seems entirely natural to meet, in the town’s outskirts, an archaic old man with a thick white beard who will speak with you, call himself Nikolai—and then dissolve, as if he had never been.
