The Upper Volga is the beginning of the Russian North. This region is gifted and original. Here, in the north, there has always been fertile ground for folk art. And today this art lives like folklore, created daily by the mind and hands of local craftsmen.
The path of crafts that existed here from the depths of centuries to our day is complicated and uneven. Many of those who have come down to us have undergone considerable changes, almost ceasing to be themselves.
The fate of the silver industry, which has settled below Kostroma from time immemorial, on the shore of the Volga bend in the village of Sidorovsky and its surroundings, is especially interesting. The jewelry industry has a difficult fate here.
At that time, the villages of Vysokovo, Ermolaiha, Kuzovtsovo, Popovka, Pesteryugino, Parshino and Ilyinskaya Deserts existed near Sidorovsky. Volgorechensk appeared in this place in the middle of the 20th century. These villages were part of the Sidorovskaya parish, famous for its silversmiths according to documentary sources since the 16th century. From the book by N.N.Korbitsky, who managed the assay chamber in the village of Krasnoye in 1913, "Handicraft jewelry in the Kostroma province and its development" it is known that "In the 17th century the village (Sidorovskoye) was listed as a palace. In 1767, in the month of May, Empress Catherine II, passing by the village of Volga, granted it with all the villages to Count Vladimir Grigoryevich Orlov…Since then, the peasants here are mostly artisans. Silversmiths, coppersmiths, coiners and lapiders. The same thing is being done in villages belonging to the Sidorovskaya patrimony."
The Volgorechenians are mostly descendants of residents of the Sidorov heritage. Their genes preserve the memory of talented ancestors, nugget jewelers who worked in these places once upon a time. That is why there is an enterprise in a young and beautiful city, the purpose of which is to restore and preserve national traditions in the jewelry art.
The Russian style in which the Volgorechensk Jewelry Factory operates was created in the 19th century and received worldwide recognition. Artistic silver of that time, thanks to the activities of such Russian jewelry firms as Sazikov, Kurlyukov, Ovchinnikov, Khlebnikov, the Grachev brothers, Nemirov-Kolodkin, Sokolov, Postnikov and a number of others, gained pan-European fame. The National School of Russian Art Silver has become a major artistic and aesthetic phenomenon in the world of applied art of the 19th - 20th century. The masters of Sidorovskaya volost used this approach to the creation of silverware in their works. The Volgorechensk Jewelry Factory considers one of its tasks to revive the "Russian style" in its best traditions, as well as to restore its prestige on the international market.
At the plant, much attention is paid to studying the history of the emergence and development of the chosen direction. Taking into account the preserved traditions of making silverware in our area, the artists of the enterprise considered it necessary to give their products a new color, a modern sound, combining in jewelry the heritage of monuments of ancient Russian literature and the artistic embodiment of images with the possibility of their utilitarian use. It was these techniques that began to be used in the 19th century, when the Russian style was in its heyday.
Making table setting items, the factory's artists use the plots of Russian folk tales and epics, reflect the peculiarities of national culture and everyday life. In its work, the company uses various traditional technologies – artistic casting, filigree, engraving, embossing, manual gilding and oxidation. The decent level of jewelry collections created by the plant is confirmed by passports of high artistic value and diplomas of Russian and international exhibitions.
The art of Russian silversmiths is of great importance for the culture and development of crafts in Russia. To contribute to the preservation and development of this art form is the most important of the tasks set by the Volgorechensk jewelry factory "Russian Silver".
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