Culture
As early as the 16th century, Kaluga was a major commercial port acting as a connecting link between Lithuania and Moscow. Back then, the city exported wooden utensils known far beyond the provincial boundaries. Starting in the 1680s, stone churches were built on the sites of wooden churches. By the latter half of the 18th century, there were 183 stone and 2235 wooden buildings in Kaluga. The 17th century Korobov mansion with its semidomes and patterned cornices is a fine example of the civil architecture of the period. Many other buildings of so-called "workplaces" have also been preserved. These include several administrative buildings connected by arches e.g. the Zolotarev town estate, the Bilibin merchant mansion, and the Inn Court comprising several trading houses designed by the famous architect P.R. Nikitin.
Read more about this topic: Kaluga Oblast
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,—those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)