Horse in the fog

9 September 2011

I found some pictures which I took in Suzdal in 2002, a summer of extreme heat and smog in Russia.  We were staying in the Pokrov convent, which at the time took paying guests, and one morning the whole place was swathed in mist.  I came across this horse grazing within the convent grounds and it made me think of ‘Hedgehog in the Fog‘ (Ёжик в тумане), that brilliant animated film by Yuri Norshteyn.  (The first creature the hedgehog encounters in the fog is a horse.)

On that trip we also visited the Museum of Wooden Architecture in Suzdal.  We went inside peasant houses to see how they would have been arranged and furnished, and in the two churches – one for summer and one more substantial and better insulated for winter. There are some great pictures of the museum on a website called russiatrek.

From ‘Hedgehog in the Fog’. Yuri Norshteyn

See also my later post – ‘A Memory‘