The government reviews show the country’s challenge as U.S. support wanes and Kyiv pivots to production from a domestic arms industry with a long history of corruption.

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Authoritarians have lost elections before, and they will again.

Eurasian leaders eagerly met the Russian leader at a summit this week, as President Trump has helped ease his isolation over the war in Ukraine.

Mining materials to make cement, gravel and a host of other common products require an explosive that is becoming more expensive and limited in supply.

At one time, many churches across northern Europe were constructed using load-bearing wooden posts termed staves, hence are known as stave churches. It’s thought that in Norway alone there used to be as many as two thousand. As they were built of wood rather than stone, fire was a danger, and between those that burned down and others that were replaced by more modern structures, there are now only thirty-one original stave churches remaining, all except three being in Norway. They have seldom been painted, and in this article I show paintings known to depict real churches from two Norwegian artists, and a relative from the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine.

JC Dahl’s Landscape in Kaupanger with a Stave Church from 1847 employs a little deception as the real church at Kaupanger had been modified structurally and looked quite different at the time. He therefore substituted the stave church at Vang, which had recently been dismantled.

Vang stave church had been built in the Middle Ages, and by 1832 was too small and in urgent need of structural repair. The local council had decided to demolish and replace it, and in 1839 JC Dahl intervened to save it. The artist bought the church at a public auction in 1841, and persuaded the then Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia to pay for the building’s removal, transportation and reconstruction in the remote village of Karpacz Górny in the Giant Mountains in Silesia. It has remained there ever since, serving a Polish Lutheran community, and attracts nearly a quarter of a million visitors each year.

The Norwegian artist Harriet Backer painted interiors of several Norwegian churches, including the stave church at Uvdal. This was built just after 1168, on the remains of an earlier church. It was expanded during the Middle Ages, and again in 1684, 1722 and 1819. Much of its internal decoration was undertaken in 1656, and extended as the building grew. It was taken out of regular use in 1893, and when Backer visited it services took place during the summer. It remains one of the finest decorated churches in northern Europe, and has been lovingly preserved.

Backer’s external view of Uvdal Church and Cemetery from 1906 is a faithful account of what from the outside looks quite a plain building. But once you get inside it, you enter another world.

Backer’s Uvdal Stave Church from 1909 does its rich decoration justice. Her brilliantly coloured view of the interior is lit from windows behind its pulpit, throwing the brightest light on the altar. The walls and ceiling are covered with images and decorations, which she sketches in, manipulating the level of detail to control their distraction. Slightly to the left of centre the main stave is decorated with rich blues, divides the canvas, but affords us the view up to the brightly lit altar. To the left of the stave a woman, dressed in her Sunday finest, sits reading outside the stalls.

The Altar at Uvdal Stave Church, painted the same year, shows the altar from one side, with its painting of the Last Supper hanging above the table, and more decorative work over the walls and ceiling. These have been painstakingly restored in the years since.

Although externally they may appear similar, wooden churches in the Carpathian Mountain region of Ukraine and Poland are structurally distinct, as they don’t rely on staves, but are built from horizontal logs.

At the end of his training in Munich, Teodor Axentowicz paid his first visit to the lands of the Hutsul people, in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. His oil painting of a Hutsul Funeral from 1882 shows the Hutsul in the rigours of winter, the coffin being towed on a sledge behind a cart, and the mourners clutching candles as they make their way through the snow to the wooden tserkva in the distance.

Further reading

Stave church on Wikipedia
Uvdal Stave Church, Wikipedia
Tserkvas of the Carpathians, Wikipedia.