The story
This gallery in the Urals city of Perm lives inside a Baroque cathedral on the bank of the Kama river, and its most extraordinary holding grew out of the same religion the building once served. These are the Perm gods, carved wooden figures of Christ and the saints made by the region's peoples after they were converted.
Painted icons never quite took here. People used to worshipping wooden idols kept carving, now giving Christ and the apostles the broad Finno-Ugric features of the local Komi and their sorrowful, downturned eyes. The church tolerated it as the price of conversion. The museum holds around 370 of these figures, the largest such collection anywhere.
The gallery gathered them from remote village churches across the Perm region in the 1920s, saving them as the churches were closing, and shows them alongside Russian icons and painting in the tall former nave.
