In winter, radiators become the home’s most attractive feature, as people like to comfortably warm themselves up near them on coming home from the cold. Modern radiators look unpretentiously, for their most important function is to stay warm. It was very different with stoves, once mandatory attributes of houses.
Stove tiles and ceramic decorations of facades and interiors are on display at the exhibition “Colors of Festival,” which will run until February 19 at the Khlibnia Gallery in the National Sanctuary St. Sophia of Kyiv. The oldest exhibits date from the 11th and 12th centuries, and most of the artifacts, coming from the sanctuary’s own collection, that of the National Museum of History of Ukraine, and private collections, are on display for the first time. Sviatoslav Yarynych, who is a curator of the exhibition and head of the educational and exhibition department of St. Sophia of Kyiv, told us more about these unique examples of architectural and decorative ceramics.
THE SUN AND THE ANGELS
Fragments of Kyivan Rus’-era tiles date to the 11th-12th centuries. Next to them, one can see Byzantine tiles, found within the city of Sudak in Crimea and dated to approximately the 13th-14th centuries. The tiles are glazed and covered in thin-line abstract designs. Yarynych commented: “They covered a tile in glazing of some specific shade and then decorated it. Such decorations were quite common in Kyivan Rus’, leading to artifacts like that being found on sites of many destroyed churches.”
Next exhibit is a series of the 19th century majolica rosettes, which once decorated St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery (photo 2). They display impressively fresh colors even now. Decoration on one of them is similar to a sunflower or the sun, and shiny white images look like a pearl necklace. “Before St. Michael’s Cathedral was completely dismantled, they let restorers and museum staff to remove the most interesting elements of ceramic decorations,” the exhibition’s curator said.
Images of angels, also done in majolica, are still fascinating despite having cracks in them. Some pieces were created in the 18th century, others in the 19th; they had decorated the Cathedral of the Dormition at the Caves Monastery of Kyiv, which was blown up in 1941. These angels “sat” under the cathedral’s domes and deteriorated with the passage of time, leading to them being replaced, so some pieces are “younger” than others. From afar, the difference was probably undetectable, but it is noticeable in the museum stand that angels of the 19th century are larger and painted in different shades of colors.
STOVES “LIVED” FOR A CENTURY OR SO
Scholars believe that at some point in the 13th century, stoves with smoke removal vents were introduced. They were lined with tiles to better accumulate and transmit heat. Originally, tiles were pot-shaped and mounted with bowl-shaped protrusions on the outside. Accordingly, such products are called bowl-shaped tiles.
The exhibition “Colors of Festival” features a bowl-shaped tile dating to the 14th century: made of terracotta and lacking any decorations, it does, in fact, look like a pot (photo 4).
“After some time, they started using so-called flat tiles which had smaller holes which opened on the inside,” Yarynych told us. “They accumulated heat, and when the stove was no longer stoked, they radiated it. This was, as they say now, more energy efficient compared to the bowl-shaped model. Such tiles are still in use.”
An ordinary tile of the 19th century with relief geometric decorations was found in the Poltava Region. It was made by a folk craftsman and has a soot-covered inside surface. Meanwhile, a giant unglazed tile decorated with floral pattern was found near St. Sophia of Kyiv. It probably lined a fairly large stove.
“According to researchers’ calculations, the average lifespan of a tile stove was 80 to 100 years. Then owners and fashions changed, and people just knocked away the old tiles,” Yarynych noted. “Fragments of tiles are found in landfills excavated near St. Sophia of Kyiv.”
A CHINESE MOTIVE
Over time, the construction of stoves got more sophisticated. Craftsmen produced special tiles for walls, corners, eaves. By the way, painting tiles by hand was a craft in itself and prospered until about the end of the 18th century.
Glazed tiles were increasingly popular in the 17th century. Their makers originally used green-colored glazing with copper salts serving as the pigment. “Subsequently, a style associated with the Italian Renaissance appeared, which involved tiles painted in several colors: blue, yellow, green, white,” the curator of the “Colors of Festival” added. “Meanwhile, in the 18th century, there was a fashion for using blue paint on white background, which came from China via the Netherlands.” Such tiles, featuring blue vases and flowers, are included in the exhibition, as are small band tiles depicting idyllic scenes, like landscapes with houses or birds which are having fun in the grass (photo 1).
FROM NIZHYN TO MEISSEN
In the late 18th to early 19th century, factory production of tiles started. Many Kyivites bought theirs from the Tile and Majolica Factory of Josafat Andrzejowski. Yarynych said that the company was founded in 1870 and existed until around 1920, when it was nationalized. The owner emigrated to Poland and died there.
Stoves were becoming more refined in style. They were now decorated with Modernist gables and various medallions.
The exhibition includes neo-Rococo medallions with a female head or a cross-legged cupid who sits atop a column (photo 3).
Since stoves were indispensable until steam heating appeared, there were offers for every budget. There were small producers of affordable products in villages and towns, like Nizhyn and Ichnia. Some people, though, ordered tiles abroad, e.g., in Germany. At the “Colors of Festival,” one of the exhibits is a set of tiles from Meissen, a famous center of porcelain and ceramics industries. They are decorated with a thin layer of gilding, elegant and kitsch-averse.
“Just imagine it: Christmas Eve, the tree is there, and the stove is radiating light. I treat these tile paintings as toys,” Yarynych reflected.
WARMING PLOTS
To look over a stove from all sides, we proceeded to the Metropolitan’s Mansion. It is equipped with a stove lined with tiles which were modeled on those found in the former metropolitan residence. Its prototype existed in the 18th century. Hundreds of tiles are covered with blue-on-white moralizing scenes.
Overall, pictures on tiles are a major and well-researched topic. Floral patterns are present worldwide. Yarynych told us: “When preparing the exhibition, I reviewed a lot of Ukrainian, Dutch, and German finds. I saw winter depicted on tiles only once. Summer motives predominated. Since stoves got most attention in winter when people were warming up beside them, they were decorated accordingly.”
Another stove, reconstructed and recreated in the Metropolitan’s Mansion, was originally installed in a tenement house at 19, Lva Tolstoho Street. Decorated with blue flowers, it reminded Yarynych of the Kyiv cake. Its tiles were made by the abovementioned Andrzejowski Factory. The owner of the house where the stove was originally installed was famous Kyivan doctor Mykola Volkovych; it has been turned into a regular apartment block since.
Iryna Abramova, head of the Metropolitan’s Mansion Museum, told us how these valuable stoves were preserved: “When these houses got renovated in the 1980s, stoves were effectively thrown out because steam heating was being installed everywhere. Many tiled stoves were lost then. But our sanctuary had the architectural ceramics department created back in the Soviet time which collected such things. The department’s employees had a list of houses that were to be renovated and visited these addresses. Sometimes they only managed to save individual tiles, and sometimes they saw that the stove was still intact, made a deal with the workers, and it came here.” Some tiles were put on display, while in the early 2000s, the sanctuary decided to collect fully-preserved stoves and put them on display at the Metropolitan’s Mansion.
CERAMICS CONQUER FACADES
Let us go back now to the “Colors of Festival.” Tile-lined stoves disappeared in the 20th century, but ceramics were used for decorating facades. “When Kyiv was liberated during the Second World War, they found Khreshchatyk Street almost completely destroyed. When reconstruction started, they got an idea to decorate the street’s facades with ceramics,” Yarynych noted. An architectural competition was held in 1945 to select the designs for standard ceramic products intended to decorate interiors and exteriors of Khreshchatyk buildings. Ceramics were to be actively used, as surviving projects show lamps with tiled decorations, details of cornices and several kinds of ceramic flooring. The drawing of a decorative column makes it clear that some projects involved the use of color, which was then abandoned.
Interestingly, the Soviet-era architects studied the long tradition of church decoration. “The Ukrainian SSR Academy of Architecture maintained the Research Institute of Building Materials, which included a laboratory of ceramics. It hired quite a few famous art historians and artists. The thesis authored by one of them, Panteleimon Musiienko, features examples of rosettes and angels which are displayed at this exhibition. They were presented as examples which needed to be emulated, at least in form. Experts studied the composition of ancient glazing substances as well,” the exhibition’s curator explained.
In the 1950s, First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev initiated a campaign against excessive ornamentation in architecture, and no ceramics were used for a decade afterwards. A modest revival occurred precisely in St. Sophia.
The so-called Sophia pottery workshop worked there under the direction of Nina Fedorova in the 1960s, and it developed, in particular, standard interior tiles. Incidentally, Fedorova’s Cosmos lining tiles, designed in the 1980s, are reminiscent of old tiles with abstract designs (photo 5).
Probably the last Kyiv monumental building to use ceramics in architecture was the House of Folk Artist Groups in Tarasa Shevchenka Boulevard. It features a large ceramic frieze, and its preparatory outline is displayed at the exhibition (photo 6).
These days, ceramics are sometimes used for decorating private dwellings and stoves. Yarynych added that many people were interested in tiles. There are groups on social networks whose members take and upload pictures of old stoves from Lviv, Odesa, etc., and some people collect tiles. Flooring or stove tiles, often elaborately decorated, retain traces of dozens and hundreds of people who lived many years ago, making them highly attractive.
