Russia · Painting & Decorative Arts
Палехская миниатюра (Palekhskaya miniatura)
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 onto a new surface and subject: black-lacquered papier-mâché boxes bearing scenes from Russian fairy tales and folklore in place of sacred images, preserving centuries of icon-painting craft by changing what it depicted rather than how it was made.
Risk level: Endangered · Not currently inscribed on a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list under this specific technique; Russia ratified the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2006 and could nominate this technique in the future.
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 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…
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…
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…
The harvesting of leaf-bud resin from the mopa mopa tree (Elaeagia pastoensis Mora), and its transformation — by boiling, hand-and-teeth chewing, dyeing, and stretching into paper-thin colored sheets, often layered with silver leaf — into…
A layered lacquer technique with origins entirely independent of and predating contact with Asian lacquerware, in which fat rendered from a scale insect (aje) is combined with plant oil and powdered dolomite or lime-rich earth to build a…
A pre-Hispanic Guerrero lacquer tradition centered on the rayado ("scratched" or incised) technique, in which a design is carved through a top layer of colored lacquer to reveal a contrasting layer beneath, then further embellished with…
Light, strong everyday objects made by layering washi over a base of paper, bamboo or wood and coating them with persimmon tannin (kakishibu) or urushi lacquer.
Lacquerware of the Hirosaki area of Aomori Prefecture in which patterns are built up in many layers of colored lacquer and then revealed by repeated grinding and polishing back through the layers (togidashi kawari-nuri).
Kiso Shikki (木曽漆器) is the lacquerware tradition of the Kiso Valley in Nagano Prefecture, built on the region's abundant local Japanese cypress (hinoki) timber and established at the start of the 17th century under the patronage of the…