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The Depository documents 21 techniques in Russia; by risk level: 3 critically endangered, 9 endangered, 8 vulnerable, 1 thriving. Each record opens with a public summary; the full research record is free to view once registered.
The metalworking and jewelry-making tradition of the Buryat people, an Indigenous Mongol ethnic group of the Lake Baikal and Transbaikal regions of Siberia, in which blacksmith-jewelers historically combined minting (chased or stamped…
The engraving, chasing, and niello decoration of silver in the mountain village of Kubachi, Dagestan, mentioned in historical annals since the 4th century, where roughly 300 of the village's approximately 2,500 residents work as…
The layered painting of miniature scenes onto fired vitreous enamel in the town of Rostov Veliky, where a copper base is coated with enamel and painted with pigment in successive layers, each individually fired at roughly 800°C — a…
The hand-forming of the samovar, Russia's iconic charcoal-heated tea urn, by the metalworking guilds of Tula — a city whose gunsmiths and armorers redirected their weapons-making skill toward a peacetime craft in the 18th century, and…
A multi-stage decorative steel technique combining engraving, acid etching, gilding, nickel-plating, and bluing on sword and dagger blades, developed at the Imperial Arms Factory in the Ural city of Zlatoust after its 1815 founding — where…
The hand-carving of unpainted linden-wood figures and moving toys in the village of Bogorodskoye, near Moscow, in which counterbalances, hidden springs, strings, and simple mechanical devices set carved figures into motion — most famously…
A lathe-turned, hand-painted lacquerware tradition of the Nizhny Novgorod region, first appearing in the second half of the 17th century, in which linden wood tableware is coated in a metallic tin or aluminum ground, freehand-painted with…
The engraved, openwork, and relief carving of walrus ivory, seal bone, and, more rarely, mammoth and elephant ivory, developed in the 17th century in Kholmogory, a White Sea port town near Arkhangelsk in Russia's far north — a tradition…
The carving of mammoth ivory by the Sakha people of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), Siberia — a material naturally preserved in the region's permafrost for thousands of years, yet one the Sakha did not begin carving until relatively…
A matrilineally transmitted clay figurine tradition of the village of Dymkovo, near Kirov, in which women hand-mold, kiln-fire, whitewash, and vividly hand-paint red-clay figures of ladies, horsemen, birds, and animals descended from…
A hand-molded clay whistle tradition of the village of Filimonovo, in Tula Oblast, whose distinctively elongated human and animal figures are a direct physical consequence of the local bluish-gray clay's own difficult behavior — it cracks…
A hand-painted ceramic tradition of the village of Gzhel, southeast of Moscow, whose signature deep cobalt-blue floral motifs on pure white porcelain are invisible until the kiln reveals them — the cobalt oxide pigment appears black,…
A knitted lace shawl tradition of the Orenburg steppe, developed in the second half of the 18th century by combining a warming Kalmyk goat-fleece undergarment with Ural Cossack fine lace technique, worked from down hair so exceptionally…
The needlework tradition of Torzhok, on the Tvertsa River in Tver Oblast, in which women embroiderers work gold thread and, later, fine twisted gold wire (containing 5 to 8 percent actual gold) onto velvet, silk, morocco leather, and other…
A wooden-bobbin lace tradition of Vologda, 300 miles north of Moscow, built around a single continuous, never-crossing braided line — the vilushechka — that winds through the entire pattern over an openwork grid, sustained by up to 100,000…
Two related but visually and historically distinct lacquer-miniature painting traditions, both descended, like Palekh (CRAFT-1871), from icon-painting centers whose masters turned to secular papier-mâché box painting after the 1917…
A miniature tempera-painting tradition of the village of Palekh, born in 1923 when icon painters — suddenly without legitimate work after the Bolshevik Revolution outlawed religious art — transferred their exact inherited technical skill…
The weaving, carving, and openwork cutting of beresta, the bark of the birch tree, one of Russia's oldest and most widespread natural craft materials — used since antiquity as a writing surface (the Slavs' oldest surviving written…
The lathe-turning and hand-painting of matryoshka, sets of wooden dolls of decreasing size nested one inside another, created in 1890 at the Abramtsevo artists' estate north of Moscow — directly inspired by a Japanese nesting figure a monk…
The processing of reindeer hide into clothing, footwear, and dwelling coverings by the Nenets, an Indigenous nomadic reindeer-herding people of the Yamal Peninsula and Russian Arctic, whose home for more than a thousand years is now…
A lapidary veneering technique developed at the Imperial Lapidary Works of Yekaterinburg, in which malachite — a soft, difficult stone found in the Ural Mountains in uniquely large, richly banded deposits — is sliced into veneer as thin as…