Merchant Totma: From Salt Works to Sea Discoveries

17 points7 km0 hours

This route introduces you to the unique salt-making trade that made Totma one of the richest towns of the Russian North. This old town of seafarers and explorers also preserves the memory of the Totma merchants who conquered Alaska and California. We'll begin the tour at “Totma Salt,” a cultural and historical landscape complex in the village of Varnitsy, Totma District, Vologda Region. It introduces the ancient salt-making trade, which played an important role in the town's development. Here you'll learn all about salt making and see open-air museum exhibits and the Kokorev Garden. The route was prepared as part of the “Vsyako Doyedem” (“We'll Get There Anyway”) project.

Route author

Yulia Drugashkova

Things to do

История
Парки
Ремесло

Route points (17)

Church of the Entry into Jerusalem in Totma

Point on route “Merchant Totma: From Salt Works to Sea Discoveries”

Point 5

Church of the Entry into Jerusalem

История • Храмы

History

The church was built in 1774–1791 with funds from the merchants Grigory and Pyotr Panov, who traded with the Russian-American Company. The church has had a difficult history: there was a fire in 1843, and in the 1930s the bell tower was destroyed. For a time the church even housed a distillery.

Architecture

The style is “Totma Baroque,” a variety of classic Northern Baroque. It is a two-tier church with a heated lower church and an unheated upper church. On the west side a narthex adjoins the building, and above it rises a bell tower of the typical “octagon on a cube” type. The facades are adorned with shaped cartouches, relief ornaments laid out of specially molded bricks right in the masonry of the walls.

Today

Today the church is not active. After restoration, the ground floor of the building houses the Museum of Seafarers of the Totma Museum Association. The second floor hosts exhibitions on the history of Orthodoxy and the sea voyages of Totma merchants. From May to November you can climb the bell tower and see Totma from a bird's-eye view.