Features of the Russian national hut

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The history of the Russian house - the hut. The hut is a log house. What log houses are, how they are cut and from what forest.

Our ancestors - the ancient Slavs, were mostly homely, economic and family people. The whole life of a Slav passed in the circle of his family or clan. And the main focus of all Slavic life, its nest was the hut - the native land in which our ancestors were born, in which the life of the clan passed, in which they died …

The name of the Russian house "hut" comes from the Old Russian "istba", which means "house, bathhouse" or "source" from the "Tale of Bygone Years …". The ancient Russian name for a wooden dwelling is rooted in the Proto-Slavic "jьstъba" and in official linguistics it is considered borrowed from the Germanic "stuba". In ancient German, "stuba" meant "warm room, bath".

Even in "The Tale of Bygone Years …" the chronicler Nestor writes that the Slavs lived in clans, each clan in its place. The way of life was patriarchal. The clan was the residence of several families under one roof, linked by blood ties and the power of a single ancestor - the head of the family. As a rule, the clan consisted of older parents - father and mother and their many sons with wives and grandchildren, who lived in the same hut with a single hearth, all worked together and obeyed the elder brother to the younger, the son to the father, and the father to the grandfather. If the genus was too large, there was not enough space for everyone, then the hut with a warm hearth grew with additional outbuildings - cages. A cage is an unheated room, a cold hut without a stove, an extension from a log house to the main, warm dwelling. Young families lived in the crates, but the hearth remained the same for everyone, food that was common for the whole family was prepared on it - lunch or dinner. The fire that kindled in the hearth was a symbol of the clan, as a source of family warmth, as a place where the whole family, the whole clan gathered to solve the most important life issues.

In ancient times, huts were "black" or "smoked". Such huts were heated by stoves without a chimney. The smoke in the firebox did not come out through the chimney, but through a window, door or chimney in the roof.

The first blond huts, according to archaeological data, appeared in Russia in the 12th century. At first, rich, wealthy peasants lived in such huts with a stove and chimneys, gradually the tradition of building a hut with a stove and a chimney began to be adopted by all peasant classes, and already in the 19th century it was rare to find a black hut, except perhaps only baths. Baths in black in Russia were built up to the twentieth century, it is enough to recall the famous song by V. Vysotsky "Bath in black":

… Swamp!

Oh, today I will wash myself white!

Drop, The walls of the bathhouse are smoked.

Swamp, Do you hear? Bathhouse for me in a black swamp! …. According to the number of walls in the hut, the houses were subdivided into four-walled, five-walled, cross-shaped and six-walled.

Hut-four-wall- the simplest structure of logs, a frame of a house from four walls. Such huts were sometimes built with a passage, sometimes without them. The roofs in such houses were gable. In the northern territories, a canopy or cage was attached to four-walled huts so that the frosty air in winter would not immediately enter the warm room and would not cool it.

Hut-five-wall - a log house with a fifth capital transverse wall inside a log house, the most common type of log hut in Russia. The fifth wall in the log house divided the premises into two unequal parts: most of it was an upper room, the second served as either a passage or an additional living part. The upper room served as the main room common to the whole family; there was a stove here - the essence of the family hearth, which heated the hut during the harsh winters. The upper room served as both a kitchen and a dining room for the whole family.

Hut-cross - a log cabin with internal transverse heel and longitudinal sixth walls. The roof in such a house was most often hipped (if in a modern way - hip), without gables. Of course, cross-shaped huts were built of a larger size than the usual five-walled, for large families, with separate rooms separated by capital walls.

Hut-six-wall - this is the same as a five-walled hut, only with two transverse, parallel to each other, the fifth and sixth main walls made of logs.

Most often, huts in Russia were built with a courtyard - additional household wooden premises. Courtyards in the house were divided into open and closed and were located to the side of the house or around it. In central Russia, open yards were most often built - without a common roof. All outbuildings: sheds, sheds, stables, barns, woodsheds, etc. stood at a distance from the hut. In the north, they built closed courtyards, under a common roof, and panels lined with wood on the ground, along which it was possible to move from one farm building to another, without fear of being caught in rain or snow, the territory of which was not blown by the through wind. Courtyards covered with a single roof adjoined the main residential hut, which made it possible, in severe winters or rainy autumn-spring days, to get from a warm hut into a woodshed, barn or stable, without risking being soaked in rain, covered with snow or being weathered by street drafts.

When building a new hut, our ancestors followed the rules developed over the centuries, because the construction of a new house is a significant event in the life of a peasant family and all traditions were observed to the smallest detail. One of the main precepts of the ancestors was the choice of a place for the future hut. A new hut should not be built on a place where there was once a cemetery, a road or a bathhouse. But at the same time, it was desirable that the place for the new house was already habitable, where people lived in complete well-being, in a bright and dry place.

The main requirement for the building material was customary - the log house was either cut from pine, spruce or larch. The trunk of conifers was tall, slender, amenable to processing with an ax and at the same time was strong, walls made of pine, spruce or larch kept warm well in the house in winter and did not heat up in summer, in the heat, keeping pleasant coolness. At the same time, the choice of a tree in the forest was governed by several rules. For example, it was impossible to cut down sick, old and dry trees that were considered dead and could, according to legends, bring illness into the house. It was impossible to cut down the trees that grew on the road and along the roads. Such trees were considered "violent" and in a frame such logs, according to legend, can fall out of the walls and crush the owners of the house.

The construction of the house was accompanied by a number of customs. During the laying of the first crown of the log house (mortgage), a coin or paper bill was placed under each corner, a piece of wool from a sheep or a small skein of woolen yarn was placed in another piece of wool, grain was poured into the third, and incense was placed under the fourth. Thus, at the very beginning of the construction of the hut, our ancestors performed such rituals for the future dwelling, which signified its wealth, family warmth, well-fed life and holiness in later life.

Holy Russia has stood for a thousand years, spreading over a vast territory from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka. And some of the traditions of wooden housing construction, the rules and customs in our country, among our contemporaries, are still preserved from the time of our Slavic ancestors. Wooden houses and baths are becoming popular again, especially in suburban dacha plots among townspeople. Pulls people to their origins, to wooden architecture, away from the dusty and stony cities outside the city, closer to nature, to the forest and the river …