We really wanted to buy a simple little brick house with a tiled roof, but it wasn't so easy. Only six months later did it work out: a friend sent me a photo of the pastor's house, I saw it and immediately fell in love. We agreed with the owners, wonderful people, in just five minutes — this is how we got our own house in the village of Zalivnoye.

At first I didn't think it could grow into anything more — I wanted to create a family nest where friends could come to visit us. The house was large, 640 square meters. A Lutheran pastor and his family lived here until 1944, and then the farm management was in the house.

On December 6, 2020, we drove into the house and our task was to clean it up so that friends and relationships could visit us for the New Year. By then, no one had lived here for more than ten years. There was no water (the pipes burst), only 3 kW of electricity was available, and only stove heating was available. We set up a tent inside the house and started living in it.

In 24 days, we supplied water and connected a flow heater, improved the power supply and built a sauna inside the house. This is how everyone prepared that 140 people visited us during the New Year holidays.

The conditions were not very good, but everything went incredibly cozy and beautiful. We realized that not only we but also other people love the old way this place is. I got the idea that it should not just be a place to live, but also a tourist attraction.

Our house, built in 1912, is well preserved. But many houses in the village were completely abandoned by people after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Each one had a “I sell” sign on it and we started buying them.

We already have 12 of our own facilities here, plus our friends, more than 25 people, have bought the entire central part of the village of Zalivnoye. We want to create the Postniken art village here [German name for Zalivny — editor's note] — like Fiskars in Finland. We plan to restore old local buildings and build new ones in the same old style.

I would like to fill Postniken with people from art spaces: artists, glassblowers, ceramists, entrepreneurs, and so on. To make a small and wonderful world that will be pleasant to be in.

I really hope that my personal love story for this place will turn out to be a self-living village, a place where everything will spin, bustle and boil even without us, so that in the evening people would sit on the streets, sing, take pictures, and some would just be happy and laughed.