Petersburg city defenders took up the recount of historical stained glass

Volunteers began an inventory of historical stained glass windows. Before the coronavirus pandemic, activists managed to describe almost the entire decorative glass heritage of Vasilievsky Island.

The method of penetrating houses storing stained-glass windows is also part of the process of drawing attention to the departing heritage, which, according to some information, once totaled about 300 buildings with decorative glazing in Petersburg. The first wave of large-scale disappearance, when more than 80% of the stained-glass windows were lost, occurred in the post-revolutionary period. The second covered the city in the early 1990s. And now, restorers and volunteers are trying to evaluate what has survived.

Today, rarity is no longer a whole stained-glass window, historically filling the entire window, and not damaged individual fragments. In the ceremonial of the old city, they are more often found in the upper transoms, which a person simply cannot reach. This complicates the attribution: the workshops left their signatures on the lower windows. The degree of safety and the extent of the losses are included in the special inventory, as well as the details of the location of the stained-glass windows, NTV correspondent Katerina Pravdina reports.

Sergei Vasiliev, an employee of the St. Petersburg branch of the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Monuments: “The destruction has become irreversible since the 1990s - early 2000s. Stained glass leaves and leaves. The reasons for this are vandalism and natural destruction. But the main thing is the attitude of people, management companies and organizations towards the remaining burdensome legacy that cannot be dealt with. Stained-glass window is too fragile, refined, difficultly preserved thing. ”

Art historians say that the technology for producing stained-glass windows has not changed since the XII century, and the European methodology for their restoration from the XIX. And she is known to modern Russian masters. The problem is that the revival of stained glass rarely finds financial support. And the inventory enthusiasts very much hope that the registry they create will not only systematize these values, but also make them take a fresh look at the need to preserve them.

Source: https://www.ntv.ru/