catholic-nnov.narod.ru was the website of the Roman Catholic parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Nizhny Novgorod. The city link was placed right in the page title itself: "Roman Catholic Parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Nizhny Novgorod"[1]. The site was hosted on narod.ru and was listed in the "Society and Nizhny Novgorodians: Religion" section of the nn.ru directory[2], and Wayback Machine snapshots of its home page span the period from September 2001 to September 2025[1][4].

What the site looked like

The earliest surviving snapshot of the home page is dated September 28, 2001. The entire text preserved from it in the archive is a single line naming the parish and its city[1]. Twelve years later, in the snapshot from September 5, 2013, the home page's content still amounts to that same line: the rest of the page is not represented as text in the archived copy[3]. Neither a postal address, nor a phone number with a Nizhny Novgorod area code, nor counter images can be read in the home-page snapshots we have preserved — of the site's design, only the title has survived.

What stood behind that title line is known from the nn.ru directory card. It described the site as follows, listing its sections: "Roman Catholic Parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Nizhny Novgorod. History. Charity. Schedule of Services"[2]. That is, the parish kept three things online: an essay on its own history, an account of its charitable work, and a practical schedule of services.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the snapshot of the "Religion" section from October 29, 2002, the directory lists 18 Nizhny Novgorod religious sites. The parish is listed there with the note "Rating: 14" and a link to the counter card at Counter.nn.ru under number 10194[2]. The very presence of a counter already set the site apart: eleven of the eighteen sites in the section had "none" in the rating column, meaning measurable traffic was recorded for only a minority of them[2]. For comparison, in the same section the Nizhny Novgorod Monastery of the Caves and the Ascension had a rating of 10, while the Nizhny Novgorod Orthodox Brotherhood of St. Right-Believing Prince Alexander Nevsky had 76[2]. What these figures meant in terms of the counter's measurements is examined in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

The parish was represented in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet by more than one address: the same directory section lists, as a separate entry, the site "Press Office of the Nizhny Novgorod Catholic Parish" (cathnews.narod.ru) with a rating of 10[2]. No votes for catholic-nnov.narod.ru are recorded in our data on the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day for 2004, and its address does not appear in the surviving results table of that vote[5].

How it closed

The address survived unusually long: the Wayback Machine captured the home page for nearly a quarter of a century — 80 times between 2001 and 2025. This longevity, however, no longer came with any content: in the check of August 4, 2025, the page returned empty, without a single line of text[4]. The last home-page snapshot in the Wayback Machine is dated September 15, 2025[4]. No relocation of the parish to another address is recorded in our data.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Religion" section, 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2025 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)