Russian Oxford: what is left of it in the city, and where to go and see it

Russian Oxford is not one quarter and it is not signposted. It is scattered: a quiet street in the north of the city, a church on the edge of it, a hundred thousand volumes in a library, and a voice on an archive recording. Here it is by address, with what you can actually go and see.

Park Town: the street where the Pasternaks lived

Start at Park Town, the curved street in north Oxford. This is where Leonid Pasternak (1862, Odesa — Oxford, 1945), the painter and father of the writer Boris Pasternak, spent his last years. He left Russia in 1921 for eye surgery, stayed in Berlin, and moved to Britain in 1938 to escape the Nazis.

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The house is a private home — and you can still get inside it. It holds a permanent exhibition, Leonid Pasternak: A Family Collection, run by The Pasternak Trust, a registered charity (no. 277599, registered 6 June 1979). It is open to the public on the first Sunday of every month, 2.30–4.30 pm, by appointment — write to info@pasternak-trust.org in advance. The exact address is not published, because it is still someone's home; it is given to those who book.

Inside is what makes the trip worth it: according to the University of Oxford, Leonid Pasternak's paintings and sketches of Leo Tolstoy, Rachmaninov and the singer Feodor Chaliapin remain in the family home. The main written archive, by contrast, is a long way off — at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California.

His daughter Lydia Pasternak Slater — chemist and translator of her brother's poetry into English — lived in the same Park Town until her death in 1989.

There is a blue plaque at 42 Park Town, though not to the Pasternaks. It honours William Morfill (1834–1909), Oxford's first Professor of Russian and the other Slavonic languages — the only confirmed Russian-related plaque in the city, and by coincidence on the same street.

The church founded by the tsarevich's English tutor

A Russian Orthodox church appeared in Oxford in 1941, started by a man with an unusual history: the hieromonk Nicholas, born Charles Sydney Gibbes, formerly English tutor to Tsarevich Alexei. In 1949 he bought a house on Marston Street and set up a house church dedicated to St Nicholas the Wonderworker.

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Today's church stands at 34 Ferry Road, Marston, Oxford, OX3 0EU. The parish belongs to the Diocese of Sourozh of the Russian Orthodox Church; the rector is Fr Stephen Platt. The parish states on its own site that it has no connection to any state body, British or foreign — Russian included — and lives on donations alone. The building has a history of its own: an Anglican mission church of 1913, later a nonconformist chapel, a factory, a reprographics studio and a warehouse. The parish bought it derelict in 2008 for £250,000, began restoration in January 2010, and the church was consecrated on 9 October 2010. Bus 13 from St Aldate's in the centre stops nearby; there is no parking on Ferry Road itself, only off Marston Road.

What language are the services in

The question everyone asks. At St Nicholas the languages are mixed — English, Church Slavonic and occasionally Greek — and they rotate by week of the month: the first weekend is English with Church Slavonic, the second predominantly English, the third predominantly Church Slavonic, the fourth predominantly English again.

An ordinary week runs: Moleben with the Akathist to St Nicholas at 6 pm, Vigil on Saturday at 5.30 pm, Sunday Liturgy at 10.30 am; on feasts, Vigil at 6 pm and Liturgy at 9.30 am. One detail that catches visitors out: the parish keeps the Julian calendar, currently thirteen days behind, although the dates in the schedule are given civil-style. Some services are held not in the church but in the parish house chapel of Christ the All-Merciful Saviour, 2 Bowness Avenue, Headington, OX3 0AJ.

There is a second parish of Russian tradition in the city — the Annunciation, at 1 Canterbury Road, OX2 6LU, sharing a building with the Greek community of the Holy Trinity. It dates from 2006, when part of the congregation moved to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople; those who stayed formed today's St Nicholas parish. Oxford ended up with two parishes of Russian tradition in two jurisdictions.

The pattern here is its own. The Annunciation serves in the Russian tradition on the second and fourth weekends of the month, in English and Slavonic, with some Romanian and Greek; the Greek community serves on the first and third Sundays — mostly in Greek and mostly in English respectively. Unlike St Nicholas, the calendar here is the new, Gregorian one, as it has been since February 2010. By the community's own description its parishioners are Russian, British, Romanian, American, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Syrian and Iraqi.

A hundred thousand volumes, and a Moscow book of 1646

The city's main Russian holdings are at the Taylor Institution Library on St Giles. The East European collection runs to roughly 100,000 volumes. One caveat for anyone planning a visit: the Slavonic Reading Room is closed because of a water leak, until further notice, with readers directed to alternative spaces.

Inside are named collections. The Morfill Collection, around 4,500 volumes, was bequeathed by that first professor of Russian. The Isaiah Berlin Collection holds some 300 books from his personal library, among them Marina Tsvetaeva's Razluka, published in Moscow and Berlin in 1922. The closed early-printed stock holds about 360 volumes printed before 1800, and the oldest book in Cyrillic here is a Kanonnik printed in Moscow in 1646, alongside Magnitsky's Arithmetic (1703) and Polikarpov's trilingual lexicon (1704).

A separate library sits at the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre at St Antony's College (62 Woodstock Road). The centre was founded in 1953, its weekly seminars have run for more than seventy years without a break, and the library holds about 25,000 volumes, mostly in Russian.

Akhmatova, June 1965

The strongest thing in Russian Oxford is not a building but a voice. In June 1965 Anna Akhmatova came to Oxford to receive an honorary doctorate of letters, arranged by Isaiah Berlin. A year before her death, a recording was made at New College of her reading her own poems in Russian — twelve minutes and thirty-one seconds of it. The university has published it on its podcast portal, free to anyone.

What Oxford no longer has

Now the honest part. The twinning with Perm has ended. Links began in 1990 and the formal agreement ran from 1995, but on 7 March 2022 the city council ended it, calling the continuation of formal civic ties untenable; any return to the question is tied to an end to Russia's breaches of international law and would need a separate decision. Perm does not appear in Oxford's current list of international links.

The Oxford Russia Fund is neither in Oxford nor giving out scholarships. The organisation is still legally alive but has been renamed New Eurasia Strategies Centre, is based in London, and according to the charity register now makes grants to think tanks researching Russia rather than awarding student scholarships.

And the question that comes up most often: we found no Russian food shop, Russian bookshop or Russian café operating in Oxford. The nearest equivalent is the East European shop Baltic Food, 88 Cowley Road, OX4 1JB. Several Polish shops sit on and around the same road.

A school for the children

For families there is The Russian Lyceum, a Russian-language school for bilingual children aged 2.5 to 14, at 1 Bardwell Road, Oxford, OX2 6SU. Classes run every Sunday, morning and afternoon, in groups of 6 to 12, with four or five subjects a day taught in Russian — Russian, maths, science, art and drama. There is a free trial day, and you can join part-way through the year.

A day's route

If you are making the trip: Park Town in the morning for the Morfill plaque — and, if it is the first Sunday of the month and you have booked ahead, the Pasternak collection in the afternoon — then walk down to St Giles and the Taylor Institution, on up Woodstock Road to St Antony's, and in the afternoon take the 13 out to Marston for the church of St Nicholas — check service times with the parish first. Play the Akhmatova recording on the way.