The Devil's Candle? Street Lighting

According to Genesis, the first thing the Creator did was to separate light from darkness. In the last century the 'Black Fellow', as he was significantly called in nineteenth-century Russia, did the same, when he lit the oil or gas lights that illuminated the city streets each evening.

Lighting has played an important role in shaping the urban way of life in Russia. Country-dwellers – always much more closely linked to the rhythms of nature – not surprisingly have influenced, both in their habits and their beliefs, the development of urban life too. We know that in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Russia, for instance, not only the peasants, but the inhabitants of the towns and cities also rose at dawn and went to bed when the sun went down.