Bikanin Mill

Nikolai Bikanin built this mill in nineteen twenty-eight at Kernavolok, near the villages of Volkostrov. He was about forty-eight years old. He made his living as a peasant farmer and was renowned as a boatbuilder. Nikolai’s daughter, Mariya Bikanina, recalled that her father had never studied the craft anywhere: he learned the work from his own father, Yakov. The two of them ripped boards with a pit saw—Yakov stood below, while Nikolai balanced on top of the log.

A windmill had to be calculated more precisely than a boat. A gust could damage its sails or the entire structure. Bikanin built a two-story post mill, in which the building itself turned on a fixed support. To catch a changed wind, the family tied a rope to the long turning beam and used a capstan to turn the mill barn around the central post.

Eight sails turned a horizontal shaft. Wooden teeth transmitted the motion to the millstones on the upper floor and to the pounders below. With one machine, Bikanin could grind rye into flour and remove the husk from barley, turning the grain into groats. For an island household, these were different products and two paid jobs.

Mariya remembered that the mills operated almost year-round. In summer, the wind weakened, haymaking began, and milling stopped; before then, neighbors tried to bring their grain in advance. They paid with money, flour, or whatever their own household had. People from Kurgenitsy brought the Bikanins good fish in payment for milling. This is how the shore of Lake Onega became part of the mill’s operation: sacks of grain arrived by water, while flour and groats were taken back.

Nikolai Bikanin died in nineteen fifty-eight. Three years later, museum carpenters dismantled his mill, moved it from Volkostrov to Kizhi Island, and restored it, replacing the parts that had deteriorated. Since then, Kernavolok has had neither sails nor a mill barn.

The very machine now stands on the shore in front of you, but on another island. Its turning circle has survived beneath the structure; inside are the millstones, pounders, and a flour bin. Its official name has retained the surname of the peasant who built it for work: Bikanin Mill.