Genre: literary and folkloric riddle.
Catalogue description: a riddle about Noah’s Ark.

Birch bark carried more than accounts and requests. This is not an ordinary letter: the riddle was scratched around the rim of a small birch-bark vessel, probably a salt cellar.

Translation: “There is a city between heaven and earth. A messenger travels to it without a road; he is mute, and he carries an unwritten letter.”

The riddle derives from the apocryphal Conversation of the Three Hierarchs: the city is Noah’s Ark, the silent messenger is the dove, and the unwritten letter is its olive branch.

Novgorod Birchbark Letter No. 10, 1360–1380.