A large-scale project to photograph all the carved wooden platbands that have survived to this day began almost by accident. In 2006, Ivan Khafizov ended up in the city of Engels, Saratov Region, where, out of boredom, he began to remove colorful shutters on wooden houses. “There were a lot of houses, the locals didn’t regret paint, so sometimes there were absolutely crazy color combinations. In general, from this trip I brought about a hundred photographs of multi-colored window frames, - recalls Khafizov. - And a month later there was a trip to the Yaroslavl region, and it turned out that the trims on the windows of Rostov the Great are completely different from those that were in Engels! This phenomenon attracted the photographer's interest, and he began to remove the platbands already consciously - moving from house to house and trying to figure out how they are similar and how they differ … Later, Ivan visited Chelyabinsk, Dmitrov, Kazan, Cheboksary, Izhevsk, in each of the cities significantly replenishing your collection. And, finally, it dawned on him: what if we put all the frames of different cities on the net, and make it so that they could not only be viewed, but also compared?
No sooner said than done: in 2010, the virtual museum Nalichniki.com appeared on the network, where numerous platbands are classified according to geography, age, type of carving, brightness and color, as well as the degree of difficulty. Now this collection contains 70 cities from twenty-something regions of the country. “The project is, of course, very large-scale, but it has an ultimate goal: to collect a collection of platbands from all regions of Russia (and, if possible, neighboring states) and classify it. - says Ivan Khafizov. - The fact is that none of our ancestors did this: neither the scientists of tsarist Russia who were contemporary to the then living wooden architecture, nor the fundamental researchers of the Soviet era. But every year the platbands are getting smaller!"
By the way, it was the insultingly small amount of information about the art of house carving that made Ivan not confine himself to photographing the objects of his hobby - collecting has become a full-fledged research, and today Khafizov can retell for hours the stories of the creation and preservation of platbands collected in different cities. "In general, platbands are one of the most underestimated elements of our traditional culture: they are unique in every city and in every city, so they could well become their hallmark, but instead they are practically not noticed …" - the photographer throws up his hands.
Ivan does all the work to collect the necessary information alone: he thinks out the route of the next expedition, travels around the cities, takes photographs and processes numerous pictures, updating his website every 1-2 weeks. For a long time, the enthusiast spent his own funds on all of this, but the scale of the study is already so large that the personal budget is simply not enough, therefore, since November this year, the site Nalichniki.com has been organizing a crowdfunding procedure, or, more simply, collecting public funding.
In total, Ivan Khafizov plans to collect 980 thousand rubles, which will be spent on 9 expeditions to 150 historical cities of the Central Federal District. In the long term, the researcher dreams of compiling an atlas of all platbands preserved on the territory of Russia."I really want to find an opportunity to preserve the unearthly beauty of carved wooden platbands for descendants", - Khafizov shares his idea, confident that not only vodka, matryoshka and balalayka should be associated with primordial Russian traditions - among the most recognizable symbols of our country I can and should nalichniki also appear.
