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:
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“The fact remains that the human being in early childhood learns to consider one or the other aspect of bodily function as evil, shameful, or unsafe. There is not a culture which does not use a combination of these devils to develop, by way of counterpoint, its own style of faith, pride, certainty, and initiative.”
—Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)