Zabłudów — a burned wooden synagogue rebuilt from drawings

Adult craftspeople raising a full-size timber frame in the open-air museum workshop at Sanok, viewed from below the assembled truss

The frame is being cut from measured drawings made by architecture students before the war. Nothing is being guessed at, and nothing about the building is being improved.

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Plate 01

Frames are assembled flat on the shop floor, then walked upright. The Museum of Folk Architecture at Sanok has been taking timber buildings apart to keep them since 1958; this is the first it has been asked to cut from paper alone.

Photo: 91 TAF / Pexels

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The building stood at Zabłudów for something over three hundred years and was one of the most photographed in Poland. It burned in 1941. What survives is paper: photographs, and a set of measured drawings good enough to build from.

The Drawings

Twenty students, one summer, and the only drawings we have

Between the wars the Department of Polish Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology sent students out to measure wooden synagogues — plans, sections, elevations, the bimah drawn close enough to show the joinery. Zabłudów was surveyed in the 1920s.

Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka worked from that material for Wooden Synagogues. It is also what the frame at Sanok is being cut from.

All five pieces in The Drawings ⟶

A reproduction of a 1920s measured elevation drawing of the Zabłudów synagogue, shown as a physical sheet of paper on a drawing table — A measured sheet carries dimensions, a section and joint detail — everything except the wood and the hand that cut it.Photo: Anete Lusina / Pexels

A metal ruler rests on a technical drawing showing cylindrical machine part dimensions — Three drawing types, three different questions — where things are, how they are stacked, what the outside looks like.Photo: Joachim Schnürle / Pexels

Timber

Close photograph of a notched log corner joint in raking side-light, showing the cut and the compressive fit of the two members

A log wall is held by its corners, and by nothing else

No nails through the wall, no frame behind it. The notch cut at each end of each log is the whole structural argument, and it is why a building this size could be raised by carpenters with axes and a rope.

Shingle is replaced in courses; sills rot from the ground up; fire is the thing that ends these buildings, and it ended Zabłudów.

Timber ⟶

Still Standing

Forty-odd wooden churches are still standing, and some of them are on a list

Still Standing ⟶

Weathered log cabin chapel with a wooden cross and flower-lined window beside an open door — Six wooden churches in southern Małopolska were inscribed by UNESCO in 2003; sixteen wooden tserkvas of the Carpathian region, eight of them in Poland, followed in 2013. Podlaskie’s timber vernacular is on neither list.Photo: Flickr / Pexels

Zabłudów, markedPodlaskie, bracketedPlaces named across the siteGeometry: shipped map kit

The six listed wooden churches of southern Małopolska
Place	Dedication
Binarowa	St Michael the Archangel
Blizne	All Saints
Dębno	St Michael the Archangel
Haczów	Assumption and St Michael
Lipnica Murowana	St Leonard
Sękowa	SS Philip and James

Sanok · Reconstruction

The Gwoździec roof went up twice

Handshouse Studio built the roof and painted ceiling of the Gwoździec synagogue at full size with volunteers, using hand tools. It hangs in the core exhibition of the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, which opened in 2014, and it is the proof that a timber frame can be recovered from drawings.

A visitor stands under it, not in front of it

The ceiling was installed at the height the original had, so the structure is overhead rather than behind glass. That is the precedent the Zabłudów work rests on.

Sanok ⟶

An adult visitor standing beneath the reconstructed Gwoździec painted ceiling installed in the POLIN Museum, Warsaw, 2014, looking upward — Hung at the height it would have had, so a visitor stands under the structure rather than in front of a model of it.Photo: Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw Main exhibition Gwoździec synagogue · Wikimedia Commons

Zabłudów

Two and a half thousand people, twenty kilometres from Białystok

Zabłudów sits on the road south out of Białystok. The Orthodox church of the Dormition and the Catholic parish of Saints Peter and Paul both stand; the Jewish cemetery is on the edge of the town.

Flat country, long sightlines, and a timber building stock with no stone to fall back on.

All four pieces in Zabłudów ⟶

A carved matzevah stone in the Zabłudów Jewish cemetery, the relief carving in sharp focus, flat fields in the background — Carved stone outlasts carved timber by centuries, which is why the cemetery is still legible and the synagogue is not.Photo: Arina Krasnikova / Pexels

Flat Podlaskie agricultural fields under a wide overcast sky, a treeline at the horizon, no figures — Flat country, long sightlines, and a timber building stock with no stone to fall back on.Photo: Altaf Shah / Pexels

Where the paper is kept

The YIVO photographic archive, the Virtual Shtetl project run by POLIN, Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the State Archives in Białystok all hold Zabłudów material. No two hold the same kind of thing.

Archives ⟶

YIVO Institute for Jewish ResearchNew York — pre-war photographs of the building
POLIN Virtual ShtetlWarsaw — an index of community documentation
Yad VashemJerusalem — names database and the Zabłudów Yizkor book
United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumWashington — Białystok-region holdings
Polish State Archives, BiałystokCivil registers, property and local government records

A synagogue that burned in 1941 is being cut again, full size, in a shed in Sanok.