Irkutsk
"Every window frame in Irkutsk is carved like lace, as though the cold had no choice but to become ornamental."
I stepped off the Trans-Siberian at Irkutsk station at six in the evening on day four of five from Moscow, and the city announced itself with a cold that was different from Moscow cold — drier, cleaner, the air carrying something mineral and distant. The station building was Soviet Baroque in the particular shade of mustard that region deploys, but the walk into the center toward my guesthouse took me through streets I had not been prepared for. Small wooden houses with window frames carved into patterns so elaborate they seemed impossible — lace in dark-stained timber, fretwork the color of old honey, shutters ornamented with flowers and geometry in combinations that had no practical purpose and every aesthetic one. I stopped every fifty meters and stared.
Irkutsk was rebuilt in wood after a fire in 1879, and the craftsmen who built it brought to the work an ambition that the climate should have discouraged and somehow amplified instead. The 130 Quarter, a preserved block near the city center, has been restored to something like the city’s nineteenth-century appearance — perhaps too cleanly, with a slight air of the museum about it — but beyond its edges, in the ordinary residential streets, the original houses sit in various states of proud decay. Some lean. Some have sunk on one side. All have their window frames intact, and the frames remain extraordinary. There is a specific pleasure in finding this level of craft in a place that has no obvious reason to be noticed, thousands of kilometers from any conventional tourist circuit.
The city rewards spending an extra day beyond the Baikal obligation. There are good cafés near the Angara River — the river that drains Baikal directly, its waters a specific clear dark blue even in winter — and a contemporary art scene that operates with the particular energy of places that feel slightly cut off from the metropolitan mainstream. The Decembrist houses, built for the exiled aristocrats who were sent to Siberia after the failed 1825 uprising, carry the particular melancholy of educated people who were given time and no other options: the libraries are well-stocked, the parlors elegantly furnished, the whole thing suffused with the intellectual life of forced leisure.
There is also, on a side street near the central market, a Georgian restaurant that has been feeding Trans-Siberian travelers for what feels like decades. The satsivi — chicken in a walnut sauce heavy with fenugreek and garlic — arrives warm and stays warm, and the tkemali plum sauce comes in a small pot that you use on everything. I had a long dinner there with a Dutch couple who’d been on the train from Beijing and a Russian literature professor from Novosibirsk who was reading Nabokov in English as a form of self-punishment, he said, though he seemed to be enjoying it. The kind of table that only assembles itself this far from the center of things.
When to go: June through September is most comfortable and pairs naturally with a Baikal trip. But Irkutsk functions as a stop year-round for the Trans-Siberian, and the carved wooden houses look extraordinary in snow. The summer light, this close to Siberia’s edge, runs absurdly long.