In the World of the Beautiful

Charms of Birch-tree Bark

An ancient tradition holds it that the world was born of a tree. Its trunk became the axis of the universe, its roots pierced the earth, and its foliage scattered around the blue and turned into stars.

The soul of a tree is a mystery. Man tries to unravel it and thus understand himself better.

From times immemorial wood was the most accessible and favourite material for folk artistic creativity – wood and birch bark. However, there has never been non-artistic creativity in people. Whatever a peasant’s hands touched – a wooden plough, a distaff or a carved shutter – they endowed everything with beauty, an exquisite ornament, or simply with a smooth and pleasant shape.

Not only things as such, but also the ability to create them was transmitted from one generation to another. However, peasant life began changing rapidly over time. Not only wooden ploughs and distaffs were forgotten; even tuyesses, vessels made of birch-tree bark, began to seem unwanted. What’s more, beauty was gone under the pressure of rushing time and urban lifestyle. It seemed that the old craft was forgotten once and for all. Nevertheless, souls enchanted by wood still exist in Russia. Quite a few centres of wood and birch-bark craftsmanship appeared over the past decade. Today we will tell our readers about the creative group "Sonmische” from Prokopyevsk, a town of miners.

One day young craftsmen Igor Cheremisov, Rafail Latypov, Rashit Bagautdinov, Evgeny Zhivotov and Kirimat Galin, already skilled wood carvers by that time, were visited by a guest from the Kemerovo region who brought a tuyess for them to appreciate it. The "jurors” said that the thing was not bad but lacked refinement. It lacked that evasive quality which beguiles the heart and the eye. "But how can this be attained?” asked the embarrassed visitor. The craftsmen looked at one another and shrugged their shoulders.

"The visitor withdrew, and we felt uneasy. The man wanted advice, but we simply let him go as he came. And we decided to try ourselves in the art of making various objects from birch-tree bark. At first it seemed to us that there was no one from whom to learn, so we decided to rely upon ourselves. It took us two years to learn to take whole bark cylinders off the birch-tree trunk. When we realized that we were unable to manage the task on our own, we decided to turn to elderly people for help,” says Igor Cheremisov.

Today few urban people know what is a tuyess. However, it is an indispensable thing in household even today. The simplicity and rationality of the construction of small vessels made from birch-tree bark that were used by our ancestors is just surprising. Salt kept in a tuyess never becomes damp; milk or kvas remain cool for a long time; on the contrary, hot water does not cool.

The size and the form of a tuyess depend on the size of birch-tree cylinders it is made of. In order to make the tuyess stronger, a "shirt” made from bark sheets is fixed around the cylinder. The "shirt” is fixed with the help of "locks”: projections on the one edge of a sheet are inserted into semi-circular cuts in the opposite edge. Then the bottom is inserted into the lower part of a tuyess; the lid is fixed in its upper part. The bottom and the lid are made from a pine or fir-tree board. The bottom is pressed into the steamed-out lower part of a tuyess. When it dries up, it holds the bottom so tightly that not a drop of a liquid will escape it. The lid must be a little smaller than the bottom in diameter, some effort is necessary to insert it into the tuyess.

There are various ways of decorating "shirts”. Sometimes the natural design of birch-tree bark can be such an ornament. In other cases, shirts can be decorated with painted, impressed or cut-through designs, or made from woven narrow birch-tree bark ribbons.

Having trodden the uneasy path of apprenticeship, masters from "Sonmische” began "paving” their own – all of them, graduates of various Siberian schools of applied arts, had been trained to display originality of thinking and individual ways in their craft. As a result, new and interesting trends appeared in the art of manufacturing objects from birch-tree bark. Rashit Bagautdinov’s ornaments on tuyesses stand out for bright oriental colouring. Fairy-tale motifs are the attractive element in Kiramat Galin’s works. The beauty of Russian popular vegetable ornament inspired Igor Cheremisin for the creation of an unusual herbal design. All of them compete with each other in manufacturing birch-tree bark vessels of complicated shapes. The samovar made by Rashit Bagautdinov will leave no one indifferent, will it?

…The soul a tree is a riddle. Man tries to unravel it in order to better understand himself.

Alexander Hudoleyev