22 Wooden Domes and No Nails in the Walls: The Island Church Built in 1714

Picture a church about as tall as a 12-story building, topped with 22 domes and made almost entirely of wood. Now picture it standing on a small island in a cold northern lake for more than 300 years.

That is the Church of the Transfiguration on Kizhi Island, in the Karelia region of northwest Russia. It stands 37 meters (about 121 feet) tall and is one of the tallest wooden buildings in Northern Europe.

Built in 1714, after lightning struck

Churches stood on this spot long before this one. Lightning burned the earlier churches in 1693, and new ones were built on the same site. An inscription on a cross inside the Transfiguration Church says its altar was laid on June 6, 1714.

The church is built mostly of pine. The flat roofs are covered with spruce planks, and the 22 domes are covered with aspen shingles.

Logs that lock together

The carpenters joined the log walls without nails. Notched logs lock into each other at the corners, and the weight of the building holds them tight. Nails were used only for the domes and roof shingles.

Nobody knows the builders’ names, but there is a legend. The master carpenter used one single axe for the whole job. When the church was finished, he threw the axe into the lake and said there never was, and never will be, another church like it.

UNESCO added Kizhi Pogost to the World Heritage List in 1990, calling it “an illustration of a carpenter pushing a technique to its furthest limits.”

Taking a church apart, piece by piece

Wood doesn’t last forever, and after almost three centuries the church needed serious help. In a long restoration project, specialists took the building apart in stages. Every piece was numbered, photographed and logged in a database. Only parts that were more than half destroyed were replaced, about 30 percent of the structure, using pine cut in winter in Karelia and dried naturally.

Next to it stand the nine-domed Church of the Intercession, built in 1764, and a bell tower rebuilt in the 1800s. Together they form the Kizhi Pogost.