The endangered wooden houses of Siberia

One of the most striking bits of the cityscapes here in Siberia and the Russian Far East has been the wooden houses that peek out from under the towers of concrete that you are accustomed to seeing in the Soviet world.

This one above, for example, was smack in the middle of Ulan-Ude, right behind my very Soviet hotel. I haven’t been able to find out too much about them, but they must have been the target of some Soviet-era preservation plans since a lot of them, like this one, occupy prime real estate. They’re really cool, and the most distinctive sort of architecture here. But sadly, most of them are now in really bad shape and close to falling down. This one was in Blagoveshchensk:

The New York Times did a story last year on how Tomsk (in western Siberia) is working to preserve its wooden houses and make them a tourist attraction. But none of the cities I’ve been to seem to have adopted that idea. Other historic buildings are being preserved, like Ulan-Ude’s pedestrian street with some nice 19th-century stone buildings, but I’ve seen similar streets everywhere from Azerbaijan to Ukraine to Bulgaria. These sorts of wooden houses are unique to Siberia and seem to be ignored.

When I’ve asked people about them, I get mainly shrugs. They’re difficult to live in, I’m told: they don’t usually have running water, for example. But with all of the money that’s in Russia now, I wonder why some rich people don’t try to buy them and modernize them, like you would do with a cool old rowhouse in the U.S. or like yuppie Chinese are doing in the hutongs in Beijing.

A few examples from Irkutsk:

I did see one restored wooden house in Irkutsk — funded, however, by the European Union:

If you like my amateur shots, I encourage you to check out this site, where a Russian photographer has collected a lot of really gorgeous photos of wooden houses around Irkutsk.