VOLUME STRUCTURE OF UKRAINIAN WOODEN CHURCH’S LOG-TOWERS: WORLD ANALOGIES AND AUTHENTIC

Abstract

The article conducts a comparative study between volume-structures of world’s wooden religious buildings’ roofing and different types of Ukrainian wooden church’s log-towers’ volume-structures. As the examples for this comparative study are analyzed the volume structures of Eastern and Western territories of the world including vertically developed roofing of beam-pillar, rafter and log-timber construction as well. The main topics of the investigation are different structures of pagodas and Buddhist temples, vertically developed rafter roofing of Scandinavian and Eastern European Christian churches as well as numerous vertical log-structures of Eastern European and Caucasus churches. All named above examples are consequently compared with determined five basic types of Ukrainian wooden church’s log-towers volume structures (as lateral trapeze or cylindrical elevated roofing, pyramidal roofing, so-called “zalom” tiered roofing, octagon-on-square roofing and “zalom” and octagon-on-square composite roofing). As a result, none of the considered world examples shows complete analogies to the whole spectrum of volume structures of Ukrainian wooden churches’ roofing. In particular, log-towers with so-called “zalom” type tiered volume structure are unique. Analogies to the most archaic volume and constructive types of log roofing of the Ukrainian wooden church (lateral trapeze or cylindrical elevated roofing, pyramidal and octagon-on-square roofing) are present in the wooden sacral architecture of neighboring territories: Carpathian region, Transcaucasian region and Russia. This conclusion proves the long-standing entire history of sacral wooden architecture formation of this region from one hand and independence of further development of the phenomenon of the Ukrainian wooden church from the other.