Barrel (architecture)

Transfiguration Church on the island of Kizhi . As barriers, a lot of “barrels” were used.

Palace of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in Kolomenskoye . In the foreground are the Queen’s chambers, covered by a double “baptized barrel”.

Stone gate in Kolomenskoye, covered with a double "baptized barrel". 17th century.

A barrel in architecture is a designation established in the Russian tradition for a peculiar type of roof of civil and church buildings. It has a complex configuration and its shape is an open cylinder or, more rarely, a half cylinder with a raised and pointed top, as a result of which a keel-shaped pediment is formed on the facade, resembling a temple head - “onion” in section.

It is difficult to accurately determine the time of occurrence of the "barrel". Structurally, the “barrel” is a modification of the so-called male gable roof - one of the oldest techniques for erecting the roof of a log building ^[1] . In the framework of this technique, the logs of the gables - “males” - are gradually shortened as they approach the ridge , while the completion of the gable is a piece cut from a log that is close in shape to a triangle. Slugs are cut into the ends of the males, which serve as the basis of the crate for the roofing. With the development of wooden architecture , the male roof evolved towards complexity - in particular, the builders were not limited to the purely triangular shape of the pediment. Varying the length of the males, the architects received coatings of quite a variety of configurations, of which the most common was a kind of roof, similar in shape to the bulbous heads of the temples, which received the name "barrel" ^[2] . If the males were installed on four sides of the log house, there was an intersection of two “barrels”, forming the so-called “baptized” or “cross barrel”. A number of sources ^[3] draws an analogy between the “baptized barrel” and the so-called cubical coating .

The most widely “barrels” were distributed in church and civil architecture in the period XVII - XVIII centuries . This type of roof was mainly used in wooden architecture, especially in the architecture of the Russian North and palace architecture (a typical example of the widespread use of “barrels” is the palace of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in Kolomensky , where sophisticated “baptized barrels” are found in abundance). Much less often, “barrels” were found in stone architecture, for example, in the Annunciation Church in the village of Taininsky, Moscow Region . In the XIX century, with the departure from the traditions of Russian architecture and the widespread transition to the roof truss structure, “barrels” practically disappeared from construction practice and reappeared only at the turn of the XIX - XX centuries as a characteristic element of the Neo-Russian style . It is in this capacity that they are present in the temple buildings of this period, such as the Church of the Savior of the Holy Face in Abramtsevo and the Church of St. Nicholas at the Straw Gatehouse .