In this article there are some interesting photos of a few Russian churches made in 1910 and today. The fact that makes them more interesting the 1910 photos are color photos also!

Russian photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) received a few patents for his color photo technique. He traveled across Russia in the beginning of the 20th century and made thousands of photos. I visited his exhibition and the photos are really stunning, especially when you understand that they were made 100 years ago but are fully in color. That’s a real lost world of Russia before the Soviet era, before WW2 and WW1.

Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia in 1918, going first to Norway and England before settling in France. By then, the tsar and his family had been executed during the Russian Revolution, and the Communist rule had been established over what was once the Russian Empire. His unique images of Russia on the eve of the revolution — recorded on glass plates — were purchased by the United States’ Library of Congress in 1948 from his heirs.

In 2001, the Library of Congress produced an exhibition, The Empire that was Russia. For this exhibition, the glass plates were scanned and color images were produced digitally from the scanned red, green, and blue monochrome images, using a process called Digichromatography which was developed by Walter Frankhauser.

In 2004, the Library contracted with Blaise Agüera y Arcas to produce an automated color composite of each of the 1,902 negatives from the high resolution digital images of the glass plate negatives. A complete description of his process and a list of other sites that have prepared digital color composite images are in the collection profile at the Library of Congress.

And here are the few photos of some churches in Seliger region that were made by Prokudin-Gorskii almost 100 years ago and each photo goes with a corresponding photo of the same place made nowadays.



Church in Ostashkov small town, 96 years ago. Check out the horse coach on the right. In the beginning of the 20th century when in the USA there were already 1,000,000 people in Russia there were only a few hundreds of passenger cars, the most common mean of transport was a horse powered transport.

Church in Ostashkov small town, today. Today there are almost no horse coaches, and even some road signs.

Ostashkov town, 96 years ago

Ostashkov town, today. Not a great change though.

Ostashkov town, Znamensky monastery, 96 years ago.

Same place, today, check those trees, on the first picture they were just planted and now there are big trees. Though probably these are already another generation of trees, two wars took place in this region so they might be burned down.

The Nilov Hermitage, 1910

Same view, today

Also Nilov Hermitage, 1910

And nowadays

Another view of the monastery in Nilov Hermitage, 1906

And today

The Nilove Hermitage, inside view, 1906

And nowadays

Another view of this place, check out the people 96 years ago

And nowadays the condition of the site is much worse.

Svetlitsa village near the Nilov hermitage, 1906

And today there is no more church, what a pity.

Another small church, 1906

And today, year 2006.

Times goes by, buildings appear and disappear, people are born and pass away but the nature, the sun, the shades, the greener stays the same, and that can be clearly seen from these photos.

More info on the color photo technology of Prokudin-Gorsky

And catalogue of his photos

Submitted by greensnake