History of the Russian log house called "hut"

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

In the morning the sun was shining, but only the sparrows screamed a lot - a sure sign of a blizzard. In the twilight, heavy snow fell, and when the wind picked up, it rushed so hard that you couldn't even see the outstretched hand. It raged all night, and the next day the storm did not lose its strength.

The hut was covered with snow to the top of the basement, on the street there are snowdrifts the size of a man - you can't even go to the neighbors, and you can't get out of the village outskirts at all. But you don't really need to go anywhere. Perhaps behind the firewood in the woodshed. There will be enough supplies in the hut for the whole winter. In the basement - barrels and tubs with pickled cucumbers, cabbage, mushrooms and lingonberries, sacks of flour, grain and bran for poultry and other animals, lard and sausages on hooks, dried fish; in the cellar, potatoes and other vegetables are poured into the piles. And there is order in the barnyard: two cows are chewing hay, which is littered with a tier above them to the roof, pigs grunt behind a fence, a bird slumbers on a roost in a chicken coop fenced in in the corner. It's cool here, but no frost. Made of thick logs, thoroughly buried walls do not allow drafts to pass through and retain the warmth of animals feeding on manure and straw.

And in the hut itself, I don't remember the frost at all - a hotly heated stove cools down for a long time. But the kids are bored: until the blizzard ends, you can't play outside the house, run around. They lie on the beds, listen to fairy tales that the grandfather tells … The most ancient Russian huts - until the 13th century - were built without a foundation, burying almost a third into the ground - it was easier to save heat. They dug a hole in which they began to collect crowns from logs. The plank floors were still far away, and they were left earthen.

A hearth was laid out on a carefully rammed floor of stones. In such a semi-dugout, people spent winters together with domestic animals, which were kept closer to the entrance. And there were no doors. A very small entrance hole - just to squeeze through - was covered from the winds and cold weather with a shield of half-timbers and a cloth canopy.

Centuries passed, and the Russian hut got out of the ground. Now it was placed on a stone foundation. And if on pillars, then the corners rested on massive logs. Those who were richer made roofs of wood, the poorer villagers covered their huts with shingles. And the doors appeared on forged hinges, and the windows were cut through, and the size of the peasant buildings increased markedly. We are best familiar with the traditional huts, as they survived in the villages of Russia from the western to the eastern limits. This is a five-walled hut, consisting of two rooms - a vestibule and a living room, or a six-walled one, when the living room itself is divided in two by another transverse wall. Such huts were set up in villages until very recently.

But the peasant hut of the Russian North was built differently. In fact, the northern hut is not just a house, but a module for full life support for a family of several people during a long, harsh winter and cold spring. A sort of docked spaceship, an ark that travels not in space, but in time - from warmth to warmth, from harvest to harvest. Human housing, housing for livestock and poultry, storage of supplies - everything is under one roof, everything is protected by powerful walls. Is that a wood shed and a barn-hayloft separately. So they are right there, in the fence, it is not difficult to break a path to them in the snow.

Such a dwelling was built in two tiers. The lower one is an economic one, there is a stockyard and a storehouse for supplies - a basement with a cellar. Upper - the dwelling of people, the upper room (from the word upper, that is, high, because at the top). The warmth of the barnyard rises, people have known this since time immemorial. To get into the upper room from the street, the porch was made high. And, climbing on it, I had to overcome a whole flight of stairs. But no matter how the snowdrifts piled up, they would not notice the entrance to the house. From the porch, the door leads to the entrance hall - a spacious vestibule, which is also a transition to other rooms. Various peasant utensils are kept here, and in the summer, when it gets warm, they sleep in the entryway. Because it's cool. Through the passage you can go down to the barnyard, from here - the door to the upper room.

You just need to enter the room carefully. To keep warm, the door was made low and the threshold high. Raise your legs higher and do not forget to bend down - you will knock a bump on the lintel for an hour.

A spacious basement is located under the upper room, the entrance to it is from the barnyard. They made basements with a height of six, eight, or even ten rows of logs - crowns. And starting to engage in trade, the owner turned the basement not only into a storehouse, but also into a village trade store - he cut through a counter window for buyers on the street. They built, however, in different ways. The Vitoslavlitsy Museum in Veliky Novgorod has a hut in general, like an ocean vessel inside: behind the street door, passages and passages to different compartments begin, and in order to get into the upper room, you need to climb a ladder-ladder to the very roof.

You cannot build such a house alone. Therefore, in the northern rural communities, a hut for young people - a new family - was erected by the whole world. The whole village was building: together they chopped and transported timber, sawed down huge logs, laid crown after crown under the roof, together they rejoiced at what was built. Only when wandering artels of artisan carpenters appeared, did they begin to hire them to build housing.

The northern hut looks huge from the outside, and there is only one living room in it - an upper room with an area of twenty meters, or even less. Everyone lives there together, old and young. There is a red corner in the hut, where icons and a lamp are hanging. The owner of the house sits here, and guests of honor are invited here.

The main place of the hostess is opposite the stove. It is called kut. And the narrow space behind the stove is a zakut. Hence the expression went to huddle in a cubbyhole - in a cramped corner or a tiny room.

"It's light in my room …" - sung in a song popular not so long ago. Alas, for a long time this was not at all the case. For the sake of keeping warm, small windows in the upper room were chopped off, they were tightened with a bull or fish bubble or with oiled canvas, which barely let light through. Only in wealthy houses could mica windows be seen. Plates of this layered mineral were fixed in figured bindings, which made the window look like a stained glass window. By the way, there were even windows made of mica in the carriage of Peter I, which is kept in the collection of the Hermitage. In winter, ice plates were inserted into the windows. They were carved on a frozen river or frozen in a mold right in the yard. It came out lighter. True, it was often necessary to prepare new "ice glasses" instead of melting ones. Glass appeared in the Middle Ages, but the Russian countryside recognized it as a building material only in the 19th century.

For a long time, in rural and even urban huts, stoves were laid without pipes. Not because they didn’t know how or didn’t think of it, but all for the same reasons - how best to save heat. No matter how you block the pipe with dampers, the frosty air still penetrates from the outside, chilling the hut, and the stove has to be heated much more often. The smoke from the stove entered the upper room and went out into the street only through small chimney windows under the very ceiling, which were opened for the duration of the firebox. And although the stove was heated with well-dried "smokeless" logs, there was enough smoke in the upper room. That is why the huts were called black or smoked. Pipes appeared only in the XV-XVI centuries, and even then where winters were not too harsh. Huts with a pipe were called white. But at first, the pipes were not made of stone, but they were knocked out of wood, which often became the cause of a fire. Only at the beginning of the 18th century, Peter I, by a special decree, ordered to install stoves with stone pipes in the city houses of the new capital - St. Petersburg, whether stone or wood. Later, in the huts of wealthy peasants, in addition to Russian stoves in which food was cooked, Dutch ovens brought to Russia by Peter I began to appear, convenient for their small size and very high heat transfer. Nevertheless, furnaces without pipes continued to be laid in northern villages until the end of the 19th century.

She will warm you, feed you, and put you to sleep. The stove is also the warmest sleeping place - a bed, which traditionally belongs to the eldest in the family. A wide shelf stretches between the wall and the stove. It is also warm there, so the children were put to sleep on the bed. Parents sat on benches, or even on the floor; bedtime has not come yet.

The architecture of the Russian hut was gradually changing and becoming more complex. There were more living quarters. In addition to the vestibule and the upper room, a svetlitsa appeared in the house - a really bright room with two or three large windows already with real glasses. Now most of the family's life took place in the parlor, and the upper room served as a kitchen. The light room was heated from the back wall of the furnace. Well-to-do peasants divided the vast residential blockhouse of the hut with two criss-cross walls, thus blocking off four rooms. Even a large Russian stove could not heat the whole room, and here it was necessary to put an additional Dutch stove in the room farthest from it.

Bad weather rages for a week, and under the roof of the hut it is almost inaudible. Everything goes on as usual. The hostess has the most trouble: milking the cows early in the morning and pouring grain for the birds. Then steam the pig bran. Bring water from a village well - two buckets on a yoke, a pound and a half in total weight! But this is not a man's business, it has been the custom since ancient times. Yes, and the food must be prepared, the family must be fed. The kids, of course, help in any way they can.

In the large northern hut, the living quarters and outbuildings were located under the same roof. A platform was often built to the doors of the hayloft, along which horses brought hay in carts.

Men have less worries in winter. The owner of the house - the breadwinner - works tirelessly all summer. Plows, mows, reaps, threshes, chops, saws, builds, hunts fish and forest animals. From dawn to dawn. As he works, his family will live until the next heat. Therefore, winter for men is a time of rest. Of course, you can't do without male hands: fix what needs to be fixed, chop and bring firewood into the house, clean and walk the horse. And in general, there are many things that neither a woman nor children can do.

The northern huts, cut down by skillful hands, stood for centuries. Generations passed, and the ark-houses still remained a reliable refuge in the harsh natural conditions. Only the mighty logs darkened with time. In the museums of wooden architecture "Vitoslavlitsy" in Veliky Novgorod and "Malye Korely" near Arkhangelsk there are huts, whose age has passed over a century and a half. Scientists-ethnographers were looking for them in abandoned villages and ransomed from the owners who had moved to the cities. Then they were carefully dismantled, transported to the museum territory and restored to their original form. This is how they appear before numerous excursionists who come to Veliky Novgorod and Arkhangelsk.

STOVES FROM PETER I

The Dutch oven (Dutch, galanka) appeared in Russia at the beginning of the 18th century. Peter I brought the first ten such ovens from Holland. Very soon, in their image and likeness, they began to lay stoves in Russian houses. Compared to the Russian stove, the Dutch woman had considerable advantages - modest size (width 1 m, depth up to 2 m) and high heat output due to winding smoke channels, in which hot air completely gave off heat, heating the bricks. A well-heated stove warmed up a small house in cold weather for 12 hours.

Dutch stoves were faced with beautiful tiles or tiles with a pattern. Quite quickly, they gained such popularity that they significantly squeezed traditional stove designs, especially in city houses. Even today, many homeowners in rural areas prefer to heat their homes with this type of stove.

Cage- a rectangular one-room log house without outbuildings, most often 2 × 3 m in size.

Cage with a stove - hut.

Basement (basement, basement) - the lower floor of the building, located under the cage and used for economic purposes.