The account of the Holstein embassies of the 1630s by their secretary, a scholar and mathematician, with engraved views of Russian towns and a careful description of how Russians built and lived.
Olearius travelled through Muscovy to Persia and back between 1633 and 1639. His book, printed in 1647 and enlarged in 1656, was quickly translated and became the standard western picture of seventeenth-century Russia.
He describes houses of whole logs laid one on another and notched together at the corners, the joints stopped with moss, roofed with boards or birch bark; he describes the market outside the walls of Moscow where whole houses were sold ready framed, to be taken down, carried and set up again in a few days, a necessity in a city that fires emptied again and again.
The book, part by part
I On Russian houses and towns
The log frame, the moss, the board roof; the market for ready-made houses.
Rules: The log frame