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Brief history of the Samovar I |
 When Americans were busy dumping tea into the dark waters of Boston harbor (late eighteenth century), a Russian gunsmith, Fedor Lisitsin, set up a small workshop south of Moscow, in the city of Tula, the heart of the Russian defense industry. Lisitsin and his two sons were laboring in their time free from making arms and ammunition for Mother Russia on a rather unusual device, which had been hitherto handcrafted by individual craftsmen in the Ural region solely for personal use: the charcoal-burning samovar.
Lisitsin's workshop was the first to produce samovars industrially and had tremendous success. Due to the blessed lack of IP law enforcement in Russia, which endures to our days, competing samovar-factories sprang up in Tula like mushrooms after the rain. By the thirties of the nineteenth century, Tula established itself as the capital of Samovar-making.
During the nineteenth century, samovars gained increasing popularity in major cities, such as St. Petersburg and Moscow, and became inseparably bound to the Russian way of life. Classics of Russian literature, like Pushkin, Gogol and Chekhov, regularly mention samovars in their works. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov has even coined an idiom, which stands for an utterly wasteful effort: to take one's own samovar to Tula. This phrase is still understood and occasionally used by most Russians.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, samovar manufacturing took root in Moscow, St. Petersburg and some industrialized parts of Siberia and the Ural region. However, Tula retained its leading and standard-setting role in this trade. By that time, four shapes of samovars became traditional: cylindric, egg-like, spherical and the most beautiful of them all, those resembling the ancient Greek vase called crater.
The beginning of the twentieth century has been marked with various attempts at innovation. The traditional heating method has been challenged by gasoline, petroleum, kerosene, gas, and other means of heating at that time. However, these models proved unpopular, due to the repugnant odor of the fuels and the dangers of inflammation and explosion.
Railroad companies in Russia recognized the practicality and popularity of samovars and fitted long-distance sleeping cars with them. Luxurious cars of the Trans-Siberian railroad were first to adopt this custom. Today, all sleeping cars from second class up are equipped with a samovar at the end of the hallway, next to the conductor's closet. Just in case you need some hot water during your journey...
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| To be continued ... |
| source: home.fazekas.hu |
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