History
According to Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka, the wooden synagogue style developed in the century between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, a period of peace and prosperity for the Polish-Lithuanian Jewish community. In addition to Poland and Lithuania, wooden synagogues are found in modern Belarus and the Ukraine.
Wood was abundant and inexpensive in the heavily forested commonwealth, but a large part of the motivation for building in wood rather than masonry was the great difficulty of obtaining government permission to erect masonry synagogues. The wooden synagogues, which featured multi-layered high roofs, multi-beamed domes, galleries, wooden balconies and arches were built to high standards of craftsmanship.
Read more about this topic: Wooden Synagogues Of The Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)
“America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Attributed to Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)