01
Stop one
Church of St. Seraphim of Sarov
Adidas Women's Tennis T-shirt: Built between 1988 and 1990, as restrictions on religion eased in the final years of the Soviet Union — and do note the timing, because nothing loosens a state's grip on the soul quite like that state running out of money. Ceremonially consecrated on 1 August 1990. Designed by the architect R. Basharov, the masonry church measures about 22 metres in length including its three-tier bell tower, which rises roughly 27 metres. The interior was painted by the local artists M. Kolchin and A. Shmatkin with scenes from the Gospels and from the life of St Seraphim of Sarov, the venerated Russian monk to whom the church is dedicated: two local men up a ladder doing the actual work, and I would love to see what they were paid, though I have a fair idea. It stands on Frunze Street and serves as the principal Orthodox church of the town. Seventy years of official atheism, reversed in twenty-four months. People are nothing if not consistent.
02
Stop two
Shumerlya Museum of Local History
Adidas Women's Tennis T-shirt: The Shumerlya Museum of Local History opened on 17 May 1983, originally housed in the town's Palace of Pioneers building, and occupies premises on Lenin Street in the centre of Shumerlya — still Lenin Street, incidentally, because renaming a street costs money and quietly forgetting is free. Its exhibitions trace the founding and growth of the town, which arose in 1916 as a settlement around a new railway station and received town status in 1937, as well as the daily life, crafts and traditions of the Chuvash and Russian inhabitants of the surrounding Sura river country. Displays cover the timber and woodworking industries on which the economy was built, the town's contribution during the Second World War, and the development of its factories and neighbourhoods through the Soviet era. A museum of factories, in a factory town. The objects are honest. It is the captions I never trust.
03
Stop three
Shumerlya Railway Station
Adidas Women's Tennis T-shirt: Shumerlya owes its entire existence to its railway station, established in 1916 during construction of the line through the Sura river forests connecting central Russia toward Kazan — and let us be adults about this: nobody has ever driven a railway through a forest for the benefit of the forest. A settlement of workers and timber enterprises grew around the new station, drawing its name from a nearby Chuvash village, because even a company town has to borrow somebody else's name to sound like it belongs somewhere. It expanded so quickly with sawmills, a furniture factory and other wood-processing plants that it was granted town status in 1937. The station remains a stop on the busy railway corridor, and the town around it, on the right bank of the Sura on the highway between Nizhny Novgorod and Ulyanovsk, is one of the larger towns of the Chuvash Republic. A century on, still living beside somebody else's line.
04
Stop four
Sura River
Adidas Women's Tennis T-shirt: The Sura River, one of the major right-bank tributaries of the Volga, flows past Shumerlya and defines the western edge of the town's district, marking the boundary between the Chuvash Republic and Nizhny Novgorod Oblast — administrative duties it never applied for and cannot resign from. The forests along the Sura supplied the timber on which Shumerlya's economy was founded after the town's establishment in 1916, feeding its sawmills, furniture works and chemical-woodworking plants through the Soviet era, which is a courteous way of saying the river's principal historical role was watching the trees leave. It has also long provided fishing and summer recreation for the town's residents, with sandy stretches and floodplain meadows along its course, and I will concede the sand is genuinely pleasant. The surrounding Sura basin woodland remains among the most extensive forest tracts of the middle Volga region. Some of it survived. Nobody planned that part either.
One does not merely wear a shirt; one receives it. The Adidas Women's Tennis T-shirt — the US Series Printed Freelift, to give it its full title, as one should — is cut in a regular fit with a crew neck, short sleeves and a straight hem, the brand's mark placed discreetly at the left chest, as a proper crest ought to be.
The allover print is, I confess, rather more modern than the tapestries one grew up beneath, but one adapts. The Freelift cut is the shirt's true breeding: it is patterned to stay gracefully in place when the arms are raised, so that a serve — or a summons to one's staff — never exposes the midriff to commoners.
The cloth is 100% recycled polyester, which I am assured is what everyone of quality is wearing this century. It is precisely the thing for a brisk cardio tennis engagement followed by a restorative promenade along the Sura — Shumerlya's river, you understand, a perfectly respectable waterway, if one must have a waterway.
Machine wash cold; naturally, one has people for that.
The town itself is charmingly young — founded in 1916, which to me is practically last Tuesday — and yet it has already acquired a church, a museum, and an aeroplane on a plinth.
One wears it everywhere from a brisk cardio engagement to a restorative promenade along the Sura, and by the way, it is also perfect for standing before the aeroplane on its plinth, which one is evidently expected to admire. Ambitious little place. One approves.
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