ARCHITECTURE
wooden architecture — research, maintenance and restoration

The building, consisting of several frameworks, is rectangular in layout. It consists of the framework of a chapel itself with a refectory and a passage attached to it and an octahedral tent belfry on top. All the Chapel rooms are covered with the same symmetrical gable roof. The entrance into the chapel is made in the form of the porch with one stair flight borne on the framework, located along the southern wall of the building, which has own gable low-pitched roof, perpendicular to the wall of the passage of the construction.

The roof of the porch rests on 5 pillars. The enclosure of the porch is solid and made of horizontally placed thin planks. Both southern and northern facades of the Veronica’s Veil Chapel have 2 windows, western facade has only one window. The tent of belfry and the framework of the chapel itself are crowned with onion-shaped domes. The dome above the chapel does not have a supporting ‘neck’ and stands on the cylindrical base, cut into the ridge of the roof. There is a small peak-shaped plank at the junction of dome with the base. Frameworks of the Veronica’s Veil Chapel and octagon of the belfry are made up of pine logs fixed according to the traditional method with the logs’ ends protruding from the edges of the walls in the corners (‘v oblo’), the framework of the porch is fixed so that logs’ ends do not protrude from the walls (‘v lapu’).

Roofs are planked and fixed with nails. The boards of the tent and the belfry have peak-shaped endings. Posts of the belfry are dual, round and have no carvings. Posts of the porch are of square section with carvings on them. Fascia boards of the pediments of the Veronica’s Veil Chapel are decorated with blind saw-like carvings (see the layout), the edges are decorated with alternate double cogs and semicircles with pierced-through round holes in the middle. The fascia boards of the porch and sloping curbs are also carved.

The ceiling (so-called ‘sky’) of the Veronica’s Veil Chapel has preserved, it consists of 16 trapezoidal icons with the image of the Forefathers. There is an image of the New Testament Trinity in the central round element, and images of the evangelists on the triangular icons in four corners. The two-tier iconostasis of an archaic type (with no frames around the icons) is not in the Chapel. The icons have been transferred to the Petrozavodsk Museum of Fine Arts. They were painted on the boundary of 17-18 centuries.