Russian émigré painter Nikolai Peroff lived in Istanbul until the end of his life. He was engaged in restorations, carried out theatre decorations, and did a lot for the Russian churches in Karaköy.
Before his arrival in Istanbul, Peroff lived in the Russian Empire. He was born in the Ryazan region and grew up in a poor family of a local deacon. He first attended classes at the Ryazan Theological Seminary and then at Kharkiv Art School, where he met his future wife (at the same time he studied at the History and Philology Faculty at Kharkiv University, but eventually realised that his true vocation was painting). According to his wife, the school was run by Imperial Academy of Arts of the Russian Empire from 1912. After having graduated from Kharkiv Art School he not only gave drawing lessons but was also a member of the Association of Kharkiv Artists. According to experts, in his works of the Kharkiv period, “the influence of both impressionism and decorative painting of modernism and symbolism can be traced” (Dyakonova, "Nikolai Peroff – Russkiy Hudojnik v Konstantinopole", n.d.). During the First World War, he served at the front and was awarded a medal. After the 1917 revolution, he fought in the ranks of the White Army and was evacuated from the Crimea to Istanbul.
In Istanbul, Nikolai Peroff initially worked as a porter. Then his situation improved and he, as an artist, started to participate in exhibitions of the Union of Russian Painters in Constantinople including First Russian émigré artists in Istanbul exhibition and Exhibition of Russian émigré artists at Taksim Military Barracks (in newspaper reports about the exhibitions of the Union his self-portrait is especially noted; it is also said that his landscapes are good, but his genre works are stronger, and the works themselves resemble Mikhail Nesterov's drawings). As a restorer, he worked on the murals in the St. Louis Church of San Stefano in Istanbul. He was not able to reunite with his family, wife and son Levushka (Levushka died in 1941), until 1923, when they moved from Kharkiv to Istanbul. In 1928–1929 Peroff completed wall paintings for churches of the Russian settlements in Karaköy (at Aya Panteleymon murals, at Aya Andrea murals and iconostases) and painted the walls of one of the Greek cathedrals (Panayia) in the city. Nikolai became the scene designer of the Istanbul Theatre by good fortune. Judging by information from various periodicals, Muhsin Ertuğrul, who devoted his entire life to Turkish theatre, by chance noticed the panel paintings made by Peroff in the photo studio of Jules Kanzler, an émigré photographer from the Russian Empire. Ertuğrul was so impressed that he decided to invite Peroff to the Istanbul Theatre as a designer. For many years (from 1927 to 1963) they worked together harmoniously. Here is how Peroff's wife remembers this period of his life: “At first it was not easy for him to work at the theatre. He had no assistants, he had to boil glue himself, rearrange the stage settings, and besides the artistic work, he did a lot of purely physical work. He left early, came home late. We did not live in the city, so every day he had to travel both by train and by boat. Sometimes he even had to stay at the theatre and work at night. Muhsin Bey was so consumed that he put on a new play every week, and therefore N.K. was always up to his eyes in work. Of course, over time, assistants appeared, and plays were staged for at least a month.” In the 1950s, the artist worked for some time at the State Opera and Ballet Theatre in Ankara. According to Ayşegül Oral Özer, during the Istanbul period of his life, he was, as an artist, inclined towards post-impressionism, and as a theatre designer towards realism. In the same years, he also became one of the founders and chairman of the Russian charitable society, which helped the Russian-speaking émigrés of Istanbul. It is also known that he sang in the church choir and was the choir director at Aya Panteleymon. Unfortunately, he suffered a heart attack when he rushed to help his neighbours during a fire, at that time he was already 80 years old. He was buried in the Russian section of the Greek cemetery in the Şişli district. According to the émigré journalist Nadir Bek (pen name of Nikolai Liodorovich Khlebnikov), the funeral was incredibly solemn. This was due not only to his merits as an artist but also to the fact that he was an extremely kind person.
As Yulia Dyakonova rightly says in her article: “The biography of Nikolai Konstantinovich Peroff is an example in the history of art in which the artist leaves behind a surprisingly rich life story with a dramatic and heroic ending, described by his contemporaries, and his legacy, with the exception of a few works in private collections, is unknown” (Dyakonova,"Nikolai Peroff – Russkiy Hudojnik v Konstantinopole", n.d.).