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Painting of a Wooden Spoon on the Upper Don

Russian craftsmen have always been famous for their skill in woodcarving. For centuries, they passed on the secrets of their ability to make wooden spoons from generation to generation.

The spoon itself has a fairly respectable age. For the first time, “Russian wooden spoons” are mentioned in “The Tale of Bygone Years” in 996. For many centuries they served as the only device for eating. Residents of the Don region considered a spoon the most practical cutlery. Many could cut a spoon on their own. More often it was made from aspen, linden, pear - an environmentally friendly material that is healthy. Wooden spoons did not spoil the taste and did not burn the oral cavity.

An interesting fact is that the expression “stare at the wall” came from the name of one of the operations for making spoons. Cutting the dice with a hatchet in the blocks of wood was considered the easiest job that even children could handle.

Carving wooden spoons with carvings and painted patterns began much later. According to the memoirs of old-timers, there were woodcarvers in the farms of the Upper Don, but this was very rare. In our stanitsa, in Soviet times, in the workshop of the Vyoshensky mechanized forestry, production was started for the manufacture and painting of wooden spoons, which were distinguished by a unique floral ornament (mostly steppe tulips - “azures” depicted on spoons). 

Flowering of azures was short-term and spectacular. To capture this beauty of the Don steppe, the masters of the artistic painting of spoons chose oil paints of black, green and red colors for their work. Many guests of the stanitsa take as a souvenir these simple tableware as a memory of the traditions of the Don region.

Alexander Tyapkin