Izvara — the Roerich Estate

The village of Izvara is first mentioned in 1500 in the cadastral book of the Vodskaya pyatina of the Novgorod land as the settlement of Vzvar; on Bergenheim's map of Ingria drawn from Swedish materials of 1676 it appears as the village of Isvar, on the map of 1704 as the manor Iswar hof, and on Schoenbeck's chart of 1705 as Izworna. The village's fate was changed by a deal at the end of the nineteenth century. By the statistics of 1888 the manor of Izvara, 3,630 desyatinas in size, belonged to the notary's wife M. V. Roerich — she had bought it in parts in 1872 and 1875 for forty-two and a half thousand roubles; the smithy and an inn were let out. Here passed the childhood and youth of Nikolai Konstantinovich Roerich — the future painter, archaeologist and thinker, author of hundreds of canvases on ancient Rus. The Izvara hills and burial mounds shaped his vision of the North: the young Roerich carried out his first digs in these very surroundings. Today a museum works in the estate: the manor house, the estate park with boulders, the water of the old pond. The exhibition tells of the artist's childhood, his Izvara drawings and his family; the atmosphere is dacha-like and quiet, without museum pomp — in the spirit of the noble nests Roerich painted. The place is intimate: allow an hour and a half and do not rush away. Izvara stands among the hills of Ingria — a rare relief for a flat region: people come here not for parade interiors but for the feel of a place the artist loved all his life. Pair the visit with Rozhdestveno — two estates of two great names, Roerich and Nabokov, in one day across the south of the oblast.