In late summer of 1993, having been made redundant from LASMO in May of that year I picked up some consultancy work in the Russian city of Tyumen in West Siberia, re-evaluating an oilfield for a small UK-based Anglo-Russian start-up company trading under the name of EuroSov Petroleum.
At the London end of the organisation were a number of my ex-colleagues from the now defunct Russia group in LASMO who had also been made redundant, and I being a geophysicist with skills in seismic interpretation and having produced a seismic stratigraphic report on the oilfields of West Siberia the previous year, had been hired to spend as long as some 6 weeks in the offices of a local Russian company ‘SIMCO’ in Tyumen. The plan was to work with and guide the local Russian staff in interpreting the available well and seismic data over the Yuzhnoye oilfield to a) verify SIMCO’s understanding of the field and therefore b) to effectively verify the reserves and development plans to an acceptable format for the western investors.
Prior to my departure from LASMO, I had spent about 9 months working in the Russia group there which in 1993 had included a 6 week stint further North of Tyumen in the provincial town of Khanty-Mansiysk, where a group of us had evaluated a number of oilfields over several weeks for potential investment. However the thrills and spills (and there are many!) of that particular adventure are for another time. Suffice to say, I knew what to expect when I was asked to go to Tyumen on my own for 6 weeks starting in mid-August, and wasn’t too fazed by it – although I was out of work and ‘in between jobs’, but importantly I was familiar with the regional geology and the geophysics, (particularly the foibles of the Russian seismic data quality), and I was therefore able to negotiate a handsome day rate.
LASMO were no longer interested in investing in Russia, mainly because the company was more-or-less broke, so we were able to use our old contacts on the ground from LASMO days. Our local man there, Oleg, knowing that I would be staying for around 5 or 6 weeks in Tyumen had greeted me with a ‘welcome back to Siberia’ present of a book, ‘Decorative Wood-carving in Tyumen’, by N. Shaikhutdinov, published in 1984 by the Mid-Ural Publishing House. The book was in Russian with some English, profusely illustrated with B&W photographs depicting and describing many of the old decoratively carved wooden houses in Tyumen.
Oleg had arranged a local interpreter for me at the going market rate of US $50 per day in hard currency – a fortune compared to local Russian salaries, particularly as many Russians were desperate at the time to convert their spare cash to US Dollars as a hedge against inflation and devaluation of the Russian Rouble. She was a middle-aged lady, and like her husband was an ex-Komsomol and ex-Communist Party member who since the dissolution of the Soviet Union was open to whatever the West could offer.
After a few days settling in and compiling my dataset, my working day became fairly routine, and I only needed a translator on hand for an hour or two in the morning and occasional phone calls and meetings throughout the day. So whilst I was working away deep in thought on the seismic data, she would be at her desk in the corner of the room reading the newspaper – for $50 per day! As the office closed around 5:00pm during the week and also Saturday afternoons and Sundays I had time on my hands, so I thought that I would explore, and photograph, some of the wooden houses with their carvings. Except that I needed to know where they were in order to find them.
So I asked my translator to translate the book into English for me, as part of her $50 per day. Better than having her sitting in the corner with a coffee and cigarette reading the newspaper all day long. One lunchtime we went shopping and managed to find a detailed street map of the City, so we marked up on the map the addresses of many of the houses that were photographed in the book. At last I had some evening entertainment in those pre-internet and pre-email days besides the BBC World Service on the Short Wave.
It should be noted that Tyumen became a very prosperous city with the opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway at the start of the last century, connecting with Moscow in the West and Vladivostok in the East. As a result of the opening, merchants and traders were able to amass large fortunes from increasing their export of furs, timber and dried fish to new markets. To show off their wealth they wanted grander houses and offices reflecting the latest styles and fashions in Moscow and Europe, and with abundant timber the houses in Tyumen were richly decorated with sophisticated wooden carvings particularly around the doors and windows.
But I digress – September arrived and the leaves were beginning to turn and drop, and 2 or 3 evenings a week after work I would rush back to my apartment to collect my camera and then wander around the city with my map and camera searching for and photographing the houses depicted in the book. I had my camera, a Nikon FE2, loaded with Kodachrome64 and equipped with a 50mm F1.8 lens and a 24mm F2.8 lens. The advantage of photographing in the evenings was that I was able to capture many of the houses in the so-called ‘Golden Hour‘, that period of daytime shortly after sunrise or before sunset during which daylight is redder and softer than when the sun is higher in the sky.
It was an interesting time as with the collapse of the Soviet Union the economy had taken a hit, and many of the houses had deteriorated since the book had been published 10 years earlier. However a number of houses were being renovated with repairs to the carving and paintwork, and many were in private ownership and being converted to offices.
Although I went back to Tyumen a handful of times between 1995 and 1998 I never had the time to explore as previously, but looking at Google Earth, in the intervening 28 years many of the houses appear to have been restored, some more sympathetically than others… but at least the wooden carving skills are being appreciated and their heritage valued and preserved.
The photograph for this Image of the Month is scanned from an original transparency on Kodachrome64 transparency film, digitally scanned in 2022 using a Nikon D850 with 60mm f2.8 Nikon Macro lens, fitted with a Nikon ES-2 film scanner attachment, with the camera set at 1.6s, f45, ISO-64. Links to details of the equipment used can be found on the web page ‘Technical Data‘.