Yesterday, a very important event for local tourism took place in Kostroma: specialists from the Moscow Geographical Institute visited the Museum of Wooden Architecture in order to take samples of wood from the log house of the Skobelkin House, which is now an exhibit of the Kostroma Museum of Wooden Architecture.
The purpose of the visit of the Moscow guests is to establish the exact date of the construction of this house by the method of dendrochronology.
The fact is that now the construction of the Skobelkin hut is officially dated to the first half of the 18th century – during the reign of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna.
However, some architectural features (for example, small windows characteristic of earlier times) and the words of the former owners of the monument (the descendants of the Skobelkin merchants still live) make one suspect that this wooden house was built much earlier – at the beginning of the 17th century, that is, even during Boris Godunov or False Dmitry the First.
If laboratory studies confirm this assumption, Kostroma will receive a unique tourist site – the oldest wooden hut in Russia. It costs a lot to get such a brand … and there is hope for it: Olga Solomina, director of the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said in an interview with media representatives that “the object is amazing” and admitted that the prospects for its “aging” for 150 years are very good.
Meanwhile, the results of dendrochronological analysis are still a month away. Meanwhile, next year, the Skobelkin house will face a large-scale restoration, for which several tens of millions of rubles have already been allocated. In the future, it will host an exposition dedicated to the Kostroma Old Believers.