Log house hut. Russian hut

The word “izba” (as well as its synonyms “yzba”, “istba”, “izba”, “istok”, “stompka”) has been used in Russian chronicles since ancient times. The connection of this term with the verbs “to drown”, “to heat” is obvious. In fact, it always designates a heated structure (as opposed to, for example, a cage).

In addition, all three east Slavic peoples- Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians - the term “heating” was retained and again meant a heated building, be it a storage room for winter storage vegetables (Belarus, Pskov region, Northern Ukraine) or a tiny living hut (Novogorodskaya, Vologda regions), but certainly with a stove.

The construction of a house for a peasant was a significant event. At the same time, it was important for him not only to solve a purely practical problem - to provide a roof over his head for himself and his family, but also to organize the living space so that it was filled with the blessings of life, warmth, love and peace. Such a dwelling could be built, according to the peasants, only by following the traditions of their ancestors; deviations from the behests of their fathers could be minimal.

When building a new house, great importance was attached to the choice of location: the place should be dry, high, bright - and at the same time its ritual value was taken into account: it should be happy. A lived-in place was considered happy, that is, a place that had stood the test of time, a place where people lived in complete prosperity. The places where people were previously buried and where there used to be a road or a bathhouse were unsuitable for construction.

Special requirements were also imposed on building material. The Russians preferred to cut huts from pine, spruce, and larch. These trees with long, even trunks fit well into the frame, tightly adjacent to each other, retained internal heat well, and did not rot for a long time. However, the choice of trees in the forest was regulated by many rules, violation of which could lead to the transformation of the built house from a house for people into a house against people, bringing misfortune. Thus, it was forbidden to take “sacred” trees for felling - they could bring death into the house. The ban applied to all old trees. According to legend, they must die a natural death in the forest. It was impossible to use dry trees that were considered dead - they would cause dryness in the household. A great misfortune will happen if a “lush” tree gets into the log house, that is, a tree that grew at a crossroads or on the site of former forest roads. Such a tree can destroy the frame and crush the owners of the house.

The construction of the house was accompanied by many rituals. The beginning of construction was marked by the ritual of sacrificing a chicken and a ram. It was carried out during the laying of the first crown of the hut. Money, wool, grain - symbols of wealth and family warmth, incense - a symbol of the holiness of the house were placed under the logs of the first crown, the window cushion, and the matitsa. The completion of construction was celebrated with a rich treat for all those involved in the work.

The Slavs, like other peoples, “unfolded” a building under construction from the body of a creature sacrificed to the Gods. According to the ancients, without such a “model” the logs could never have formed into an orderly structure. The “construction victim” seemed to convey its form to the hut, helping to create something rationally organized out of the primeval chaos... “Ideally,” the construction victim should be a person. But human sacrifice was resorted to only in rare, truly exceptional cases - for example, when laying a fortress for protection from enemies, when it came to the life or death of the entire tribe. In normal construction, they were content with animals, most often a horse or a bull. Archaeologists have excavated and studied in detail more than one thousand Slavic dwellings: at the base of some of them the skulls of these very animals were found. Horse skulls are especially often found. So the “skates” on the roofs of Russian huts are by no means “for beauty”. In the old days, a tail made of bast was also attached to the back of the horse, after which the hut was completely like a horse. The house itself was represented as a “body”, the four corners as four “legs”. Scientists write that instead of a wooden “horse”, a real horse’s skull was once strengthened. Buried skulls are found both under huts of the 10th century, and under those built five centuries after baptism - in the 14th-15th centuries. Over the course of half a millennium, they only began to put them in a shallower hole. As a rule, this hole was located at the holy (red) angle - just under the icons! - or under the threshold so that evil cannot enter the house.

Another favorite sacrificial animal when laying the foundation of a house was a rooster (chicken). Suffice it to recall “cockerels” as roof decorations, as well as the widespread belief that evil spirits should disappear at the crow of a rooster. They also placed a bull's skull at the base of the hut. And yet, the ancient belief that a house was built “at someone’s expense” persisted ineradicably. For this reason, they tried to leave at least something, even the edge of the roof, unfinished, deceiving fate.

Roofing diagram:
1 - gutter,
2 - stupid,
3 - Stamik,
4 - slightly,
5 - flint,
6 - prince's slega ("knes"),
7 - widespread,
8 - male,
9 - fall,
10 - prichelina,
11 - chicken,
12 - pass,
13 - bull,
14 - oppression.

General view of the hut

What kind of house did our great-great-great-grandfather, who lived a thousand years ago, build for himself and his family?

This, first of all, depended on where he lived and what tribe he belonged to. After all, even now, having visited villages in the north and south of European Russia, one cannot help but notice the difference in the type of housing: in the north it is a wooden log hut, in the south it is a mud hut.

Not a single product of folk culture was invented overnight in the form in which ethnographic science found it: folk thought worked for centuries, creating harmony and beauty. Of course, this also applies to housing. Historians write that the difference between the two main types of traditional houses can be traced during excavations of settlements in which people lived before our era.

Traditions were largely determined by climatic conditions and the availability of suitable building materials. In the north, moist soil always prevailed and there was a lot of timber, while in the south, in the forest-steppe zone, the soil was drier, but there was not always enough timber, so it was necessary to turn to other building materials. Therefore, in the south, until a very late time (until the 14th-15th centuries), the common people's dwelling was a half-dugout 0.5-1 m deep into the ground. In the rainy north, on the contrary, a ground house with a floor, often even slightly raised above the ground, appeared very early.

Scientists write that the ancient Slavic half-dugout “climbed” out of the ground into the light of God for many centuries, gradually turning into a ground hut in the Slavic south.

In the north, with its damp climate and abundance of first-class forest, semi-underground housing turned into above-ground (hut) much faster. Despite the fact that the traditions of housing construction among the northern Slavic tribes (Krivichi and Ilmen Slovenes) cannot be traced as far back in time as their southern neighbors, scientists have every reason to believe that log huts were erected here as early as the 2nd millennium BC era, that is, long before these places entered the sphere of influence of the early Slavs. And at the end of the 1st millennium AD, a stable type of log dwelling had already developed here, while in the south half-dugouts had long dominated. Well, each dwelling was best suited for its territory.

This is what, for example, the “average” residential hut of the 9th-11th centuries looked like from the city of Ladoga (now Staraya Ladoga on the Volkhov River). Usually it was a square building (that is, when viewed from above) with a side of 4-5 m. Sometimes the log house was erected directly on the site of the future house, sometimes it was first assembled on the side - in the forest, and then, disassembled, transported to the construction site and they were already folded “cleanly”. Scientists were told about this by notches - “numbers”, applied in order to the logs, starting from the bottom.

The builders took care not to confuse them during transportation: log house required careful adjustment of the crowns.

To make the logs fit closer to each other, a longitudinal recess was made in one of them, into which the convex side of the other fit. Ancient craftsmen made a recess in the lower log and made sure that the logs were facing up with the side that was facing north in a living tree. On this side the annual layers are denser and smaller. And the grooves between the logs were caulked with swamp moss, which, by the way, has the property of killing bacteria, and were often coated with clay. But the custom of sheathing a log house with planks is historically relatively new for Russia. It was first depicted in miniatures of a 16th-century manuscript.

The floor in the hut was sometimes made of earth, but more often it was made of wood, raised above the ground on beams-lags cut into the lower crown. In this case, a hole was made in the floor into a shallow underground cellar.

Wealthy people usually built houses with two dwellings, often with a superstructure on top, which gave the house the appearance of a three-tier house from the outside.

A kind of hallway was often attached to the hut - a canopy about 2 m wide. Sometimes, however, the canopy was significantly expanded and a stable for livestock was built in it. The canopy was also used in other ways. In the spacious, neat entryway they kept property, made something in bad weather, and in the summer they could, for example, put guests to sleep there. Archaeologists call such a dwelling “two-chamber,” meaning that it has two rooms.

According to written sources, starting from the 10th century, unheated extensions to huts - cages - became widespread. They communicated again through the entryway. The cage served as a summer bedroom, a year-round storage room, and in winter - a kind of “refrigerator”.

The usual roof of Russian houses was made of wood, planks, shingles or shingles. In the XVI and XVII centuries It was customary to cover the top of the roof with birch bark to prevent moisture; this gave it a variegated look; and sometimes earth and turf were placed on the roof to protect against fire. The shape of the roofs was pitched on two sides with gables on the other two sides. Sometimes all departments of the house, that is, the basement, middle tier and attic, were under one slope, but more often the attic, and in others the middle floors had their own special roofs. Rich people had intricately shaped roofs, for example, barrel roofs in the shape of barrels, and Japanese roofs in the shape of a cloak. Along the edges, the roof was bordered with slotted ridges, scars, railings, or railings with turned balusters. Sometimes, along the entire outskirts, towers were made - depressions with semicircular or heart-shaped lines. Such recesses were mainly made in towers or attics and were sometimes so small and frequent that they formed the edge of the roof, and sometimes so large that there were only two or three of them on each side, and windows were inserted in the middle of them.

If half-dugouts, covered up to the roof with soil, were, as a rule, devoid of windows, then the Ladoga huts already have windows. True, they are still very far from modern ones, with bindings, windows and clear glass. Window glass appeared in Rus' in the 10th-11th centuries, but even later it was very expensive and was used mostly in princely palaces and churches. In simple huts, so-called drag (from “to drag” in the sense of pushing apart and sliding) windows were installed to allow smoke to pass through.

Two adjacent logs were cut to the middle, and a rectangular frame with a wooden latch that ran horizontally was inserted into the hole. One could look out of such a window, but that was all. They were called that way - “enlighteners”... When necessary, skin was pulled over them; in general, these openings in the huts of the poor were small to preserve warmth, and when they were closed, it was almost dark in the hut in the middle of the day. In wealthy houses, windows were made large and small; the former were called red, the latter were oblong and narrow in shape.

The additional crown of logs encircling the Ladoga huts at some distance from the main one caused considerable controversy among scientists. Let's not forget that from ancient houses to our times, only one or two lower crowns and random fragments of a collapsed roof and floorboards have been well preserved: figure out, archaeologist, where everything is. Therefore, very different assumptions are sometimes made about the constructive purpose of the found parts. What purpose this additional external crown served - a single point of view has not yet been developed. Some researchers believe that it bordered the zavalinka (a low insulating embankment along the outer walls of the hut), preventing it from spreading. Other scientists think that the ancient huts were not surrounded by rubble - the wall was, as it were, two-layered, the residential frame was surrounded by a kind of gallery, which served both as a heat insulator and a utility storage room. Judging by archaeological data, a toilet was often located at the very rear, dead-end end of the gallery. It is understandable that our ancestors, who lived in a harsh climate with frosty winters, wanted to use hut heat to heat the latrine and at the same time prevent a bad smell from entering the home. The toilet in Rus' was called the “backside”. This word first appears in documents from the early 16th century.

Like the semi-dugouts of the southern Slavs, the ancient huts of the northern Slavic tribes remained in use for many centuries. Already in that ancient time, folk talent developed a type of housing that very well suited local conditions, and life, almost until recently, did not give people a reason to deviate from the usual, comfortable and tradition-sanctified models.

The interior of the hut

Peasant houses, as a rule, had one or two, rarely three, living spaces connected by a vestibule. The most typical house for Russia was a house consisting of a warm room heated by a stove and a vestibule. They were used for household needs and as a kind of vestibule between the cold of the street and the warmth of the hut.

In the houses of wealthy peasants, in addition to the hut itself, which was heated by a Russian stove, there was another, summer, ceremonial room - the upper room, which was also used in everyday life by large families. In this case, the room was heated with a Dutch oven.

The interior of the hut was distinguished by its simplicity and expedient placement of the objects included in it. The main space of the hut was occupied by the oven, which in most of Russia was located at the entrance, to the right or left of the door.

Only in the southern, central black earth zone of European Russia was the stove located in the corner farthest from the entrance. The table always stood in the corner, diagonally from the stove. Above it was a shrine with icons. There were fixed benches along the walls, and above them were shelves cut into the walls. In the back part of the hut, from the stove to the side wall under the ceiling, there was a wooden flooring - a floor. In the southern Russian regions, behind the side wall of the stove there could be a wooden flooring for sleeping - a floor, a platform. This whole immovable environment of the hut was built together with the house and was called a mansion outfit.

The stove played a major role in the internal space of the Russian home throughout all stages of its existence. It’s not for nothing that the room where the Russian stove stood was called “a hut, a stove.” The Russian stove is a type of oven in which the fire is lit inside the stove, and not on an open area at the top. The smoke exits through the mouth - the hole into which the fuel is placed, or through a specially designed chimney. The Russian stove in a peasant hut had the shape of a cube: its usual length is 1.8-2 m, width 1.6-1.8 m, height 1.7 m. The upper part of the stove is flat, convenient for lying on. The furnace firebox is relatively large in size: 1.2-1.4 m high, up to 1.5 m wide, with a vaulted ceiling and a flat bottom - the hearth. Estuary, usually rectangular shape or with a semicircular top part, was closed with a damper, an iron shield cut to the shape of the mouth with a handle. In front of the mouth there was a small platform - a pole on which household utensils were placed in order to push them into the oven with a handle. Russian stoves always stood on the stove, which was a log house with three or four crowns of round logs or blocks, on top of which a log roll was made, which was smeared with a thick layer of clay, this served as the bottom of the stove. Russian stoves had one or four stove pillars. Stoves differed in chimney design. The oldest type of Russian oven was a stove without a chimney, called a chicken stove or black stove. The smoke came out through the mouth and during the fire hung under the ceiling in a thick layer, causing the top rims of the logs in the hut to become covered with black resinous soot. Shelves were used to settle the soot - shelves located along the perimeter of the hut above the windows; they separated the smoky top from the clean bottom. To allow smoke to escape from the room, a door and a small hole in the ceiling or in the back wall of the hut - a smoke duct - were opened. After the firebox, this hole was closed with a wooden shield in the southern lip. the hole was plugged with rags.

Another type of Russian stove - half-white or half-kurnaya - is a transitional form from a black stove to a white stove with a chimney. Semi-white stoves do not have brick chimney, but a pipe is placed above the pole, and above it a small round hole is made in the ceiling, leading into a wooden pipe. During the fire, an iron round pipe, somewhat wider than a samovar, is inserted between the pipe and the hole in the ceiling. After heating the stove, the pipe is removed and the hole is closed.

A white Russian stove requires a pipe for the smoke to escape. A pipe is laid above the brick pole to collect the smoke that comes out of the mouth of the stove. From the nozzle, smoke enters a burnt brick hog laid horizontally in the attic, and from there into a vertical chimney.

In earlier times, stoves were often made of clay, with stones often added to the thickness, which allowed the stove to heat up more and hold heat longer. In the northern Russian provinces, cobblestones were driven into clay in layers, alternating layers of clay and stones.

The location of the stove in the hut was strictly regulated. In most of European Russia and Siberia, the stove was located near the entrance, to the right or left of the door. Depending on the area, the mouth of the stove could be turned towards the front facade wall of the house or towards the side. In the southern Russian provinces, the stove was usually located in the far right or left corner of the hut with the mouth facing the side wall or front door. There are many ideas, beliefs, rituals, and magical techniques associated with the stove. In the traditional mind, the stove was an integral part of the home; if a house did not have a stove, it was considered uninhabited. According to popular beliefs, a brownie lives under or behind the stove, the patron of the hearth, kind and helpful in some situations, capricious and even dangerous in others. In a system of behavior where such an opposition as “friend” - “stranger” is essential, the attitude of the owners towards a guest or stranger changed if he happened to sit on their stove; both the person who dined with the owner’s family at the same table and the one who sat on the stove was already perceived as “one of our own.” Turning to the stove occurred during all rituals, the main idea of ​​which was the transition to a new state, quality, status.

The stove was the second most important “center of holiness” in the house - after the red, God's corner - and maybe even the first.

The part of the hut from the mouth to the opposite wall, the space in which all women’s work related to cooking was carried out, was called the stove corner. Here, near the window, opposite the mouth of the stove, in every house there were hand millstones, which is why the corner is also called a millstone. In the corner of the stove there was a bench or counter with shelves inside, which was used as kitchen table. On the walls there were observers - shelves for tableware, cabinets. Above, at the level of the shelf holders, there was a stove beam, on which kitchen utensils were placed and a variety of household utensils were stacked.

The stove corner was considered a dirty place, in contrast to the rest of the clean space of the hut. Therefore, the peasants always sought to separate it from the rest of the room with a curtain made of variegated chintz, colored homespun, or a wooden partition. The corner of the stove, covered by a board partition, formed a small room called a “closet” or “prilub.”
It was an exclusively female space in the hut: here women prepared food and rested after work. During holidays, when many guests came to the house, a second table was placed near the stove for women, where they feasted separately from the men who sat at the table in the red corner. Men, even their own families, could not enter the women’s quarters unless absolutely necessary. The appearance of a stranger there was considered completely unacceptable.

The traditional stationary furnishings of the home lasted the longest around the stove in the women's corner.

The red corner, like the stove, was an important landmark in the interior space of the hut.

In most of European Russia, in the Urals, in Siberia, the red corner represented the space between the side and façade wall in the depths of the hut, limited by a corner that is located diagonally from the stove.

In the southern Russian regions of European Russia, the red corner is the space enclosed between the wall with the door in the hallway and the side wall. The stove was located in the depths of the hut, diagonally from the red corner. In a traditional dwelling throughout almost the entire territory of Russia, with the exception of the southern Russian provinces, the red corner is well lit, since both walls composing it had windows. The main decoration of the red corner is a shrine with icons and a lamp, which is why it is also called “holy”. As a rule, everywhere in Russia, in addition to the shrine, there is a table in the red corner, only in a number of places in the Pskov and Velikoluksk provinces. it is placed in the wall between the windows - opposite the corner of the stove. In the red corner, next to the table, two benches meet, and on top, above the shrine, there are two shelves; hence the Western-South Russian name for the corner of the day (the place where the elements of home decoration meet and connect).

All significant events of family life were noted in the red corner. Here, both everyday meals and festive feasts took place at the table, and many calendar rituals took place. In the wedding ceremony, the matchmaking of the bride, her ransom from her girlfriends and brother took place in the red corner; from the red corner of her father's house they took her to the church for the wedding, brought her to the groom's house and took her to the red corner too. During harvesting, the first and last ones were installed in the red corner. The preservation of the first and last ears of the harvest, endowed, according to folk legends, with magical powers, promised well-being for the family, home, and entire household. In the red corner, daily prayers were performed, from which any important undertaking began. It is the most honorable place in the house. According to traditional etiquette, a person who came to a hut could only go there at the special invitation of the owners. They tried to keep the red corner clean and elegantly decorated. The name “red” itself means “beautiful”, “good”, “light”. It was decorated with embroidered towels, popular prints, and postcards. The most beautiful household utensils were placed on the shelves near the red corner, the most securities, objects. Everywhere among Russians, when laying the foundation of a house, it was a common custom to place money under the lower crown in all corners, and a larger coin was placed under the red corner.

Some authors associate the religious understanding of the red corner exclusively with Christianity. In their opinion, the only sacred center of the house in pagan times was the stove. God's corner and the oven are even interpreted by them as Christian and pagan centers. These scientists see in their mutual arrangement a kind of illustration of Russian dual faith; they were simply replaced in God’s corner by more ancient pagan ones, and at first they undoubtedly coexisted there with them.

As for the stove... let us think seriously whether the “kind” and “honest” Empress Stove, in whose presence they did not dare to say a swear word, under which, according to the concepts of the ancients, lived the soul of the hut - the Brownie - could she personify " darkness"? No way. It is much more likely to assume that the stove was placed in the northern corner as an insurmountable barrier to the forces of death and evil seeking to break into the home.

The relatively small space of the hut, about 20-25 sq.m., was organized in such a way that a fairly large family of seven or eight people could comfortably accommodate it. This was achieved due to the fact that each family member knew his place in the common space. Men usually worked and rested during the day in the men's half of the hut, which included a front corner with icons and a bench near the entrance. Women and children were in the women's quarters near the stove during the day. Places for sleeping at night were also allocated. Old people slept on the floor near the doors, the stove or on the stove, on a cabbage, children and single youth slept under the sheets or on the sheets. In warm weather, adult married couples spent the night in cages and vestibules; in cold weather, on a bench under the curtains or on a platform near the stove.

Each family member knew his place at the table. The owner of the house sat under the icons during a family meal. His eldest son was located at right hand from the father, the second son is on the left, the third is next to his older brother. Children under marriageable age were seated on a bench running from the front corner along the facade. Women ate while sitting on side benches or stools. It was not supposed to violate the established order in the house unless absolutely necessary. The person who violated them could be severely punished.

On weekdays the hut looked quite modest. There was nothing superfluous in it: the table stood without a tablecloth, the walls without decorations. Everyday utensils were placed in the stove corner and on the shelves.

On a holiday, the hut was transformed: the table was moved to the middle, covered with a tablecloth, and festive utensils, previously stored in cages, were displayed on the shelves.

The interior of the upper room differed from the interior of the hut by the presence of a Dutch stove instead of a Russian stove or the absence of a stove altogether. The rest of the mansion outfit, with the exception of the beds and sleeping platform, repeated the fixed outfit of the hut. The peculiarity of the upper room was that it was always ready to receive guests.

Benches were made under the windows of the hut, which did not belong to the furniture, but formed part of the extension of the building and were fixedly attached to the walls: the board was cut into the wall of the hut at one end, and supports were made on the other: legs, headstocks, headrests. In ancient huts, benches were decorated with an “edge” - a board nailed to the edge of the bench, hanging from it like a frill. Such shops were called “edged” or “with a canopy”, “with a valance”. In a traditional Russian home, benches ran along the walls in a circle, starting from the entrance, and served for sitting, sleeping, and storing various household items. Each shop in the hut had its own name, associated either with the landmarks of the internal space, or with the ideas that had developed in traditional culture about the activity of a man or woman being confined to a specific place in the house (men's, women's shops). Under the benches they stored various items that were easy to get if necessary - axes, tools, shoes, etc. In traditional rituals and in the sphere of traditional norms of behavior, the bench acts as a place in which not everyone is allowed to sit. Thus, when entering a house, especially for strangers, it was customary to stand at the threshold until the owners invited them to come in and sit down. The same applies to matchmakers: they walked to the table and sat on the bench only by invitation. In funeral rituals, the deceased was placed on a bench, but not just any bench, but one located along the floorboards.

A long shop is a shop that differs from others in its length. Depending on the local tradition of distributing objects in the space of the house, a long bench could have different place in the hut. In the northern and central Russian provinces, in the Volga region, it stretched from the conic to the red corner, along the side wall of the house. In the southern Great Russian provinces it ran from the red corner along the wall of the facade. From the point of view of the spatial division of the house, the long shop, like the stove corner, was traditionally considered a women's place, where at the appropriate time they did certain women's work, such as spinning, knitting, embroidery, sewing. The dead were placed on a long bench, always located along the floorboards. Therefore, in some provinces of Russia, matchmakers never sat on this bench. Otherwise, their business could go wrong.

A short bench is a bench that runs along the front wall of a house facing the street. During family meals, men sat on it.

The shop located near the stove was called kutnaya. Buckets of water, pots, cast iron pots were placed on it, and freshly baked bread was placed on it.
The threshold bench ran along the wall where the door was located. It was used by women instead of a kitchen table and differed from other benches in the house in the absence of an edge along the edge.
A bench is a bench that runs from the stove along the wall or door partition to the front wall of the house. The surface level of this bench is higher than other benches in the house. The bench at the front has folding or sliding doors or can be closed with a curtain. Inside there are shelves for dishes, buckets, cast iron pots, and pots.

Konik was the name for a men's shop. It was short and wide. In most of Russia, it took the form of a box with a hinged flat lid or a box with sliding doors. The konik probably got its name from the horse’s head carved from wood that adorned its side. Konik was located in the residential part of the peasant house, near the door. It was considered a "men's" shop, since it was workplace men. Here they were engaged in small crafts: weaving bast shoes, baskets, repairing harnesses, knitting fishing nets, etc. Under the conic there were also the tools necessary for these works.

A place on a bench was considered more prestigious than on a bench; the guest could judge the attitude of the hosts towards him, depending on where he was seated - on a bench or on a bench.

Furniture and decoration

A necessary element of home decoration was a table that served for daily and holiday meals. The table was one of the most ancient types of movable furniture, although the earliest tables were made of adobe and fixed. Such a table with adobe benches around it were discovered in Pronsky dwellings of the 11th-13th centuries (Ryazan province) and in a Kyiv dugout of the 12th century. The four legs of a table from a dugout in Kyiv are racks dug into the ground. In a traditional Russian home, a movable table always had a permanent place; it stood in the most honorable place - in the red corner, in which the icons were located. In Northern Russian houses, the table was always located along the floorboards, that is, with the narrower side towards the front wall of the hut. In some places, for example in the Upper Volga region, the table was placed only for the duration of the meal; after eating it was placed sideways on a shelf under the images. This was done so that there was more space in the hut.

In the forest zone of Russia, carpentry tables had a unique shape: a massive underframe, that is, a frame connecting the legs of the table, was covered with boards, the legs were made short and thick, the large tabletop was always made removable and protruded beyond the underframe in order to make it more comfortable to sit. In the underframe there was a cabinet with double doors for tableware and bread needed for the day.

In traditional culture, in ritual practice, in the sphere of norms of behavior, etc., great importance was attached to the table. This is evidenced by its clear spatial location in the red corner. Any promotion of him from there can only be associated with a ritual or crisis situation. The exclusive role of the table was expressed in almost all rituals, one of the elements of which was a meal. It manifested itself with particular brightness in the wedding ceremony, in which almost every stage ended with a feast. The table was conceptualized in the popular consciousness as “God’s palm”, giving daily bread, therefore knocking on the table at which one eats was considered a sin. In ordinary, non-feast times, only bread, usually wrapped in a tablecloth, and a salt shaker could be on the table.

In the sphere of traditional norms of behavior, the table has always been a place where the unity of people took place: a person who was invited to dine at the master’s table was perceived as “one of our own.”
The table was covered with a tablecloth. In the peasant hut, tablecloths were made from homespun, both simple plain weave and made using the technique of bran and multi-shaft weaving. Tablecloths used every day were sewn from two motley panels, usually with a checkered pattern (the colors are very varied) or simply rough canvas. This tablecloth was used to cover the table during lunch, and after eating it was either removed or used to cover the bread left on the table. Holiday tablecloths were different best quality fabrics, such additional details as lace stitching between two panels, tassels, lace or fringe around the perimeter, as well as a pattern on the fabric.

In Russian life, the following types of benches were distinguished: saddle bench, portable bench and extension bench. Saddle bench - a bench with a folding backrest ("saddleback") was used for sitting and sleeping. If it was necessary to arrange a sleeping place, the backrest along the top, along the circular grooves made in the upper parts of the side stops of the bench, was thrown to the other side of the bench, and the latter was moved towards the bench, so that a kind of bed was formed, limited in front by a “crossbar”. The back of the saddle bench was often decorated with through carvings, which significantly reduced its weight. This type of bench was used mainly in urban and monastic life.

Portable bench - a bench with four legs or two blank boards, as needed, attached to the table, used for sitting. If there was not enough sleeping space, the bench could be moved and placed along the bench to increase space for an additional bed. Portable benches were one of the oldest forms of furniture among the Russians.
An extension bench is a bench with two legs, located only at one end of the seat; the other end of such a bench was placed on a bench. Often this type of bench was made from a single piece of wood in such a way that the legs were two tree roots, chopped to a certain length.

In the old days, a bed was a bench or bench attached to the wall, to which another bench was attached. On these lavas they laid a bed, which consisted of three parts: a down jacket or feather bed, a headboard and pillows. A headboard or headrest is a support under the head on which a pillow was placed. It is a wooden sloping plane on blocks; at the back there could be a solid or lattice back, at the corners - carved or turned columns. There were two headboards - the lower one was called paper and was placed under the upper one, and a pillow was placed on the upper one. The bed was covered with a sheet made of linen or silk, and the top was covered with a blanket that went under the pillow. Beds were made more elegantly on holidays or at weddings, and more simply on ordinary days. In general, however, beds belonged only to rich people, and even those had their decorations more for show, and the owners themselves were more willing to sleep on simple animal skins. For people of means, felt was the usual bed, and poor villagers slept on stoves, putting their own clothes under their heads, or on bare benches.

The dishes were placed in stands: these were pillars with numerous shelves between them. On the lower, wider shelves, massive dishes were stored; on the upper, narrower shelves, small dishes were placed.

A vessel was used to store separately used utensils: a wooden shelf or an open shelf cabinet. The vessel could have the shape of a closed frame or be open at the top; often its side walls were decorated with carvings or had figured shapes (for example, oval). Above one or two shelves of the dishware, a rail could be nailed on the outside to stabilize the dishes and to place the plates on edge. As a rule, the dishware was located above the ship's bench, at hand at the hostess. It has long been a necessary detail in the immovable decoration of the hut.

The main decoration of houses were icons. Icons were placed on a shelf or open cabinet called a shrine. It was made of wood and often decorated with carvings and paintings. The goddess quite often had two tiers: new icons were placed in the lower tier, old, faded icons were placed in the upper tier. It was always located in the red corner of the hut. In addition to the icons, the shrine contained objects consecrated in the church: holy water, willow, an Easter egg, and sometimes the Gospel. Important documents were stored there: bills, promissory notes, payment notebooks, memorials. Here also lay a wing for sweeping icons. A curtain, or shrine, was often hung on the shrine to cover the icons. This kind of shelf or cabinet was common in all Russian huts, since, according to the peasants, icons should have stood and not hung in the corner of the hut.

The bozhnik was a narrow, long piece of homespun canvas, decorated along one side and at the ends with embroidery, woven ornaments, ribbons, and lace. The god was hung so as to cover the icons from above and from the sides, but did not cover the faces.

The decoration of the red corner in the form of a bird, 10-25 cm in size, was called a dove. It is suspended from the ceiling in front of the images on a thread or rope. Doves were made from wood (pine, birch), sometimes painted red, blue, white, green. The tail and wings of such doves were made of splinter chips in the form of fans. Birds were also common, the body of which was made of straw, and the head, wings and tail were made of paper. The appearance of the image of a dove as a decoration of the red corner is associated with the Christian tradition, where the dove symbolizes the Holy Spirit.

The red corner was also decorated with a shroud, a rectangular piece of fabric sewn from two pieces of white thin canvas or chintz. The dimensions of the shroud can be different, usually 70 cm long, 150 cm wide. White shrouds were decorated along the lower edge with embroidery, woven patterns, ribbons, and lace. The shroud was attached to the corner under the images. At the same time, the goddess or icon was surrounded by a godman on top.

The Old Believers considered it necessary to cover the faces of the icons from prying eyes, so they were hung with the gospel. It consists of two stitched panels of white canvas, decorated with embroidery with a geometric or stylized floral pattern in several rows with red cotton threads, stripes of red cotton between the rows of embroidery, flounces along the bottom edge or lace. The field of canvas free from embroidery stripes was filled with stars made with red thread. The gospel was hung in front of the icons, secured to the wall or shrine using fabric loops. It was only pulled apart during prayer.

For the festive decoration of the hut, a towel was used - a sheet of white fabric, home-made or, less often, factory-made, trimmed with embroidery, woven colored patterns, ribbons, stripes of colored chintz, lace, sequins, braid, braid, fringe. It was decorated, as a rule, at the ends. The panel of the towel was rarely ornamented. The nature and quantity of decorations, their location, color, material - all this was determined by local tradition, as well as the purpose of the towel. They were hung on the walls, icons to big holidays, such as Easter, Christmas, Pentecost (the day of the Holy Trinity), to the patronal holidays of the village, i.e. holidays in honor of the patron saint of the village, for cherished days - holidays celebrated on the occasion of important events that took place in the village. In addition, towels were hung during weddings, at a christening dinner, on the day of a meal on the occasion of a son’s return from military service or the arrival of long-awaited relatives. Towels were hung on the walls that made up the red corner of the hut, and in the red corner itself. They were put on wooden nails - “hooks”, “matches”, driven into the walls. According to custom, towels were a necessary part of a girl's trousseau. It was customary to show them to the husband's relatives on the second day of the wedding feast. The young woman hung towels in the hut on top of her mother-in-law’s towels so that everyone could admire her work. The number of towels, the quality of the linen, the skill of embroidery - all this made it possible to appreciate the hard work, neatness, and taste of the young woman. The towel generally played a big role in the ritual life of the Russian village. It was an important attribute of wedding, birth, funeral and memorial rituals. Very often it acted as an object of veneration, an object of special importance, without which the ritual of any rite would not be complete.

On the wedding day, the towel was used by the bride as a veil. Throwed over her head, it was supposed to protect her from the evil eye and damage at the most crucial moment of her life. The towel was used in the ritual of “union of the newlyweds” before the crown: they tied the hands of the bride and groom “forever and ever, for many years to come.” The towel was given to the midwife who delivered the baby, and to the godfather and godmother who baptized the baby. The towel was present in the “babina porridge” ritual that took place after the birth of a child. However, the towel played a special role in funeral and memorial rituals. According to the beliefs of Russian peasants, a towel hung on the window on the day of a person’s death contained his soul for forty days. The slightest movement of the fabric was seen as a sign of its presence in the house. At forties, the towel was shaken outside the village, thereby sending the soul from “our world” to the “other world.”

All these actions with a towel were widespread in the Russian village. They were based on ancient mythological ideas of the Slavs. In them, the towel acted as a talisman, a sign of belonging to a certain family group, and was interpreted as an object that embodied the souls of the ancestors of the “parents” who carefully observed the lives of the living.

This symbolism of the towel excluded its use for wiping hands, face, and floor. For this purpose, they used a rukoternik, a wiping machine, a wiping machine, etc.

Over the course of a thousand years, many small wooden objects disappeared without a trace, rotted, and crumbled into dust. But not all. Something has been found by archaeologists, something can be suggested by the study of the cultural heritage of related and neighboring peoples. Later examples recorded by ethnographers also shed some light... In a word, one can talk endlessly about the interior decoration of a Russian hut.

Utensil

It was difficult to imagine a peasant house without numerous utensils that had accumulated over decades, if not centuries, and literally filled the space. In the Russian village, utensils were called “everything movable in the house, dwelling,” according to V.I. Dahl. In fact, utensils are the entire set of objects necessary for a person in his everyday life. Utensils are utensils for preparing, preparing and storing food, serving it on the table; various containers for storing household items and clothing; items for personal hygiene and home hygiene; items for lighting fires, storing and consuming tobacco and for cosmetics.

In the Russian village, mostly wooden pottery utensils were used. Metal, glass, and porcelain were less common. According to the manufacturing technique, wooden utensils could be chiseled, hammered, cooper's, carpentry, or lathe. Utensils made from birch bark, woven from twigs, straw, and pine roots were also in great use. Some of the wooden items needed in the household were made by the male half of the family. Most of the items were purchased at fairs and markets, especially for cooperage and turning utensils, the manufacture of which required special knowledge and tools.

Pottery was used mainly for cooking food in the oven and serving it on the table, sometimes for salting and pickling vegetables.

Metal utensils of the traditional type were mainly copper, tin or silver. Its presence in the house was a clear indication of the family’s prosperity, its thriftiness, and respect for family traditions. Such utensils were sold only at the most critical moments in a family’s life.

The utensils that filled the house were made, purchased, and stored by Russian peasants, naturally based on their purely practical use. However, in some cases, from the point of view of the peasant important points In life, almost every one of its objects turned from a utilitarian thing into a symbolic one. At one point during the wedding ceremony, the dowry chest turned from a container for storing clothes into a symbol of the family’s prosperity and the bride’s hard work. A spoon with the scoop facing up meant that it would be used at a funeral meal. An extra spoon on the table foreshadowed the arrival of guests, etc. Some utensils had a very high semiotic status, others a lower one.

Bodnya, a household item, was a wooden container for storing clothes and small household items. In the Russian village, two types of bodny were known. The first type was a long hollowed-out wooden log, the side walls of which were made of solid boards. A hole with a lid on leather hinges was located at the top of the deck. Bodnya of the second type is a dugout or cooper's tub with a lid, 60-100 cm high, bottom diameter 54-80 cm. Bodnya were usually locked and stored in cages. From the second half of the 19th century. began to be replaced by chests.

To store bulky household supplies in cages, barrels, tubs, and baskets of various sizes and volumes were used. In the old days, barrels were the most common container for both liquids and bulk solids, for example: grain, flour, flax, fish, dried meat, horse meat and various small goods.

To prepare pickles, pickles, soaks, kvass, water for future use, and to store flour and cereals, tubs were used. As a rule, the tubs were made by coopers, i.e. were made from wooden planks - rivets, fastened with hoops. they were made in the shape of a truncated cone or cylinder. they could have three legs, which were a continuation of the rivets. The necessary accessories for the tub were a circle and a lid. The food placed in the tub was pressed in a circle, and oppression was placed on top. This was done so that the pickles and pickles were always in the brine and did not float to the surface. The lid protected food from dust. The mug and lid had small handles.

Lukoshkom was an open cylindrical container made of bast, with a flat bottom, made of wooden planks or bark. It was done with or without a spoon handle. The size of the basket was determined by its purpose and was called accordingly: “nabirika”, “bridge”, “berry”, “mycelium”, etc. If the basket was intended for storing bulk products, it was closed with a flat lid placed on top.

For many centuries, the main kitchen vessel in Rus' was a pot - a cooking utensil in the form of a clay vessel with a wide open top, a low rim, and a round body, smoothly tapering to the bottom. The pots could be of different sizes: from a small pot for 200-300 g of porridge to a huge pot that could hold up to 2-3 buckets of water. The shape of the pot did not change throughout its existence and was well suited for cooking in a Russian oven. They were rarely ornamented; they were decorated with narrow concentric circles or a chain of shallow dimples and triangles pressed around the rim or on the shoulders of the vessel. In the peasant house there were about a dozen or more pots of different sizes. They treasured the pots and tried to handle them carefully. If it cracked, it was braided with birch bark and used for storing food.

A pot is a household, utilitarian object; in the ritual life of the Russian people it acquired additional ritual functions. Scientists believe that this is one of the most ritualized household utensils. In popular beliefs, a pot was conceptualized as a living anthropomorphic creature that had a throat, a handle, a spout, and a shard. Pots are usually divided into pots that carry a feminine essence, and pots with a masculine essence embedded in them. Thus, in the southern provinces of European Russia, the housewife, when buying a pot, tried to determine its gender: whether it was a pot or a potter. It was believed that food cooked in a pot would be more tasty than in a pot.

It is also interesting to note that in the popular consciousness there is a clear parallel between the fate of the pot and the fate of man. The pot found quite wide application in funeral rituals. Thus, in most of the territory of European Russia, the custom of breaking pots when removing the dead from the house was widespread. This custom was perceived as a statement of a person’s departure from life, home, or village. In Olonets province. this idea was expressed somewhat differently. After the funeral, a pot filled with hot coals in the deceased’s house was placed upside down on the grave, and the coals scattered and went out. In addition, the deceased was washed with water taken from a new pot two hours after death. After consumption, it was taken away from the house and buried in the ground or thrown into water. It was believed that the last life force a person, which is drained while washing the deceased. If such a pot is left in the house, then the deceased will return from the other world and frighten the people living in the hut.

The pot was also used as an attribute of some ritual actions at weddings. So, according to custom, the “wedding celebrants,” led by groomsmen and matchmakers, came in the morning to break pots to the room where the wedding night of the newlyweds took place, before they left. Breaking pots was perceived as demonstrating a turning point in the fate of a girl and a guy who became a woman and a man.

In the beliefs of the Russian people, the pot often acts as a talisman. In Vyatka province, for example, to protect chickens from hawks and crows, an old pot was hung upside down on the fence. This was done without fail on Maundy Thursday before sunrise, when witchcraft spells were especially strong. In this case, the pot seemed to absorb them into itself and receive additional magical power.

To serve food on the table, such tableware was used as a dish. It was usually round or oval in shape, shallow, on a low tray, with wide edges. In peasant life, mainly wooden dishes were common. Dishes intended for holidays were decorated with paintings. They depicted plant shoots, small geometric figures, fantastic animals and birds, fish and skates. The dish was used both in everyday and festive life. On weekdays, fish, meat, porridge, cabbage, cucumbers and other “thick” dishes were served on a platter, eaten after soup or cabbage soup. On holidays, in addition to meat and fish, pancakes, pies, buns, cheesecakes, gingerbread cookies, nuts, candies and other sweets were served on the platter. In addition, there was a custom to serve guests a glass of wine, mead, mash, vodka or beer on a platter. The end of the festive meal was indicated by bringing out an empty dish covered with another or a cloth.

Dishes were used during folk rituals, fortune telling, and magical procedures. In maternity rituals, a dish of water was used during the ritual of magical cleansing of the woman in labor and the midwife, which was carried out on the third day after childbirth. The woman in labor “silvered her grandmother,” i.e. threw silver coins into the water poured by the midwife, and the midwife washed her face, chest and hands. In the wedding ceremony, the dish was used for public display of ritual objects and the presentation of gifts. The dish was also used in some rituals of the annual cycle. For example, in Kursk province. On the day of St. Basil of Caesarea, January 1 (January 14), according to custom, a roast pig was placed on a dish - a symbol of the wealth of the house expected in the new year. The head of the family raised the plate with the pig to the icons three times, and everyone else prayed to St. Vasily about the numerous offspring of livestock. The dish was also an attribute of the girls’ Christmas fortune-telling, called “podblyudnye”. In the Russian village there was a ban on its use on some days of the folk calendar. It was impossible to serve a dish of food on the table on the day of the Beheading of John the Baptist on August 29, (September 11), since, according to Christian legend, on this day Solome presented the severed head on a platter to her mother Herodias. At the end of the 18th and 19th centuries. a dish was also called a bowl, plate, bowl, saucer.

A bowl was used for drinking and eating. A wooden bowl is a hemispherical vessel on a small tray, sometimes with handles or rings instead of handles, and without a lid. Often an inscription was made along the edge of the bowl. Either along the crown or along the entire surface, the bowl was decorated with paintings, including floral and zoomorphic ornaments (bowls with Severodvinsk painting are widely known). Bowls were made various sizes- depending on their use. Large bowls, weighing up to 800 g or more, were used along with scrapers, brothers and ladles during holidays and eves for drinking beer and mash, when many guests gathered. In monasteries, large bowls were used to serve kvass to the table. Small bowls, hollowed out of clay, were used in peasant life during lunch - for serving cabbage soup, stew, fish soup, etc. During lunch, food was served on the table in a common bowl; separate dishes were used only during holidays. They began to eat at a sign from the owner; they did not talk while eating. Guests who entered the house were treated to the same thing that they ate themselves, and from the same dishes.

The cup was used in various rituals, especially in life cycle rituals. It was also used in calendar rituals. Signs and beliefs were associated with the cup: at the end of the festive dinner, it was customary to drink the cup to the bottom for the health of the host and hostess; those who did not do this were considered an enemy. Draining the cup, they wished the owner: “Good luck, victory, health, and that there would be no more blood left in his enemies than in this cup.” The cup is also mentioned in conspiracies.

A mug was used to drink various drinks. A mug is a cylindrical container of varying volume with a handle. Clay and wood mugs were decorated with paintings, and wooden mugs were decorated with carvings; the surface of some mugs was covered with birch bark weaving. They were used in everyday and festive life, and they were also the subject of ritual actions.

A glass was used to drink intoxicating drinks. It is a small vessel round shape, having a leg and a flat bottom, sometimes there could be a handle and a lid. The glasses were usually painted or decorated with carvings. This vessel was used as an individual vessel for drinking mash, beer, intoxicated mead, and later wine and vodka on holidays, since drinking was allowed only on holidays and such drinks were a festive treat for guests. It was accepted to drink for the health of other people, and not for oneself. Bringing a glass of wine to a guest, the host expected a glass in return.

Charka was most often used in wedding ceremonies. The priest offered a glass of wine to the newlyweds after the wedding. They took turns taking three sips from this glass. Having finished the wine, the husband threw the glass under his feet and trampled it at the same time as his wife, saying: “Let those who begin to sow discord and dislike among us be trampled under our feet.” It was believed that whichever spouse stepped on it first would dominate the family. The owner presented the first glass of vodka at the wedding feast to the sorcerer, who was invited to the wedding as an honored guest in order to save the newlyweds from damage. The sorcerer asked for the second glass himself and only after that began to protect the newlyweds from evil forces.

Until forks appeared, the only utensils for eating were spoons. They were mostly wooden. Spoons were decorated with paintings or carvings. Various signs associated with spoons were observed. It was impossible to place the spoon so that it rested with its handle on the table and the other end on the plate, since evil spirits could penetrate along the spoon, like across a bridge, into the bowl. It was not allowed to knock spoons on the table, as this would make “the evil one rejoice” and “the evil ones would come to dinner” (creatures personifying poverty and misfortune). It was considered a sin to remove spoons from the table on the eve of the fasts prescribed by the church, so the spoons remained on the table until the morning. You cannot put an extra spoon, otherwise there will be an extra mouth or evil spirits will sit at the table. As a gift, you had to bring a spoon for a housewarming, along with a loaf of bread, salt and money. The spoon was widely used in ritual actions.

Traditional utensils for Russian feasts were valleys, ladles, bratins, and brackets. Valleys were not considered valuable items that needed to be displayed in the best place in the house, as was, for example, done with ladles or ladles.

A poker, a grip, a frying pan, a bread shovel, a broom - these are objects associated with the hearth and oven.

A poker is a short, thick iron rod with a curved end, which was used to stir coals in the stove and rake out the heat. Pots and cast iron pots were moved in the oven with the help of a grip; they could also be removed or installed in the oven. It consists of a metal bow mounted on a long wooden handle. Before planting the bread in the oven, coal and ash were cleared from under the oven by sweeping it with a broom. A broomstick is a long wooden handle, to the end of which pine, juniper branches, straw, a washcloth or a rag were tied. Using a bread shovel, they put bread and pies into the oven, and also took them out of there. All these utensils participated in one or another ritual action.

Thus, the Russian hut, with its special, well-organized space, fixed decoration, movable furniture, decoration and utensils, was a single whole, constituting a whole world for the peasant.

Russian hut: where and how our ancestors built huts, structure and decor, elements of the hut, videos, riddles and proverbs about the hut and reasonable housekeeping.

“Oh, what mansions!” - this is how we often talk now about spacious new apartment or dacha. We speak without thinking about the meaning of this word. After all, a mansion is an ancient peasant dwelling, consisting of several buildings. What kind of mansions did the peasants have in their Russian huts? How was the Russian traditional hut built?

In this article:

—Where were huts built before?
— attitude towards the Russian hut in Russian folk culture,
- arrangement of a Russian hut,
- decoration and decor of a Russian hut,
- Russian stove and red corner, male and female halves of a Russian house,
- elements of the Russian hut and peasant yard (dictionary),
- proverbs and sayings, signs about the Russian hut.

Russian hut

Since I come from the north and grew up on the White Sea, I will show photographs of northern houses in the article. And as the epigraph to my story about the Russian hut, I chose the words of D. S. Likhachev:

“Russian North! It is difficult for me to express in words my admiration, my admiration for this region. When, as a boy of thirteen, I first drove along the Barents and White seas, along the Northern Dvina, visited the Pomors, peasant huts, listened to songs and fairy tales, looked at these extraordinary beautiful people, who behaved simply and with dignity, I was completely stunned. It seemed to me that this is the only way to truly live: measuredly and easily, working and receiving so much satisfaction from this work... In the Russian North there is the most amazing combination of present and past, modernity and history, watercolor lyricism of water, earth, sky, the formidable power of stone , storms, cold, snow and air" (D.S. Likhachev. Russian culture. - M., 2000. - P. 409-410).

Where were huts built before?

The favorite place to build a village and build Russian huts was the bank of a river or lake. The peasants were also guided by practicality - proximity to the river and boat as a means of transportation, but also by aesthetic reasons. From the windows of the hut, standing on a high place, there was a beautiful view of the lake, forests, meadows, fields, as well as of their own yard with barns, and a bathhouse near the river.

Northern villages are visible from afar, they were never located in the lowlands, always on the hills, near the forest, near the water on the high bank of the river, they became the center of a beautiful picture of the unity of man and nature, and fit organically into the surrounding landscape. At the highest place they usually built a church and a bell tower in the center of the village.

The house was built thoroughly, “to last for centuries”; the place for it was chosen to be quite high, dry, protected from cold winds - on a high hill. They tried to locate villages where there were fertile lands, rich meadows, forests, rivers or lakes. The huts were placed in such a way that they had good access and access, and the windows were turned “towards the summer” - to the sunny side.

In the north, they tried to place houses on the southern slope of the hill, so that its top would reliably cover the house from violent cold weather. northern winds. The south side will always warm up well, and the house will be warm.

If we consider the location of the hut on the site, then they tried to place it closer to its northern part. The house was protected from the wind gardening part of the site.

In terms of the orientation of the Russian hut according to the sun (north, south, west, east) there was also a special structure of the village. It was very important that the windows of the residential part of the house were located in the direction of the sun. For better illumination of houses in rows, they were placed in a checkerboard pattern relative to each other. All the houses on the streets of the village “looked” in one direction - towards the sun, towards the river. From the window one could see sunrises and sunsets, the movement of ships along the river.

A safe place to build a hut considered a place to lie down to rest cattle. After all, cows were considered by our ancestors as a fertile life-giving force, because the cow was often the breadwinner of the family.

They tried not to build houses in swamps or near them; these places were considered “chill”, and the crops there often suffered from frosts. But a river or lake near the house is always good.

When choosing a place to build a house, the men guessed - they used an experiment. Women never participated in it. They took sheep's wool. It was placed in a clay pot. And they left it overnight at the site of the future home. The result was considered positive if the wool became damp by morning. This means the house will be rich.

There were other fortune-telling experiments. For example, in the evening they left chalk on the site of the future house overnight. If the chalk attracted ants, it was considered a good sign. If ants do not live on this land, then it is better not to build a house here. The result was checked in the morning the next day.

They began cutting down the house in early spring (Lent) or in other months of the year on the new moon. If a tree is cut down on the waning Moon, it will quickly rot, which is why there was such a ban. There were also more stringent daily regulations. Timber harvesting began from winter Nikola on December 19th. The best time for harvesting wood was considered to be December - January, after the first frost, when excess moisture leaves the trunk. They did not cut down dry trees or trees with growths for the house, trees that fell to the north when felled. These beliefs applied specifically to trees; other materials were not subject to such standards.

They did not build houses on the sites of houses burned by lightning. It was believed that Elijah the prophet used lightning to strike places of evil spirits. They also did not build houses where there had previously been a bathhouse, where someone had been injured with an ax or a knife, where human bones had been found, where there had previously been a bathhouse or where a road had previously passed, where some misfortune had occurred, for example, a flood.

Attitude to the Russian hut in folk culture

A house in Rus' had many names: hut, hut, tower, holupy, mansion, khoromina and temple. Yes, don’t be surprised – a temple! Mansions (huts) were equated to a temple, because a temple is also a house, the House of God! And in the hut there was always a holy, red corner.

The peasants treated the house as a living being. Even the names of the parts of the house are similar to the names of the parts of the human body and his world! This is a feature of the Russian house - “human”, that is anthropomorphic names of parts of the hut:

• Brow of the hut- this is her face. The pediment of the hut and the outer opening in the stove could be called chel.
• Prichelina- from the word “brow”, that is, decoration on the brow of the hut,
• Platbands- from the word “face”, “on the face” of the hut.
• Ocelye- from the word “eyes”, window. This was the name of a part of a woman’s headdress, and the same name was given to the decoration of a window.
• Forehead- that was the name of the frontal plate. There were also “heads” in the design of the house.
• Heel, foot- that was the name of part of the doors.

There were also zoomorphic names in the structure of the hut and yard: “bulls”, “hens”, “horse”, “crane” - well.

The word "hut" comes from the Old Slavic “istba”. “Istboyu, stokkoyu” was the name for a heated residential log house (and “klet” was an unheated log house for a residential building).

The house and the hut were living models of the world for people. The house was that secret place in which people expressed ideas about themselves, about the world, built their world and their lives according to the laws of harmony. Home is a part of life and a way to connect and shape your life. Home is a sacred space, an image of family and homeland, a model of the world and human life, a person’s connection with the natural world and with God. A house is a space that a person builds with his own hands, and which is with him from the first to last days his life on Earth. Building a house is a repetition by man of the work of the Creator, because the human home, according to the ideas of the people, is a small world created according to the rules of the “big world”.

By the appearance of a Russian house one could determine the social status, religion, and nationality of its owners. In one village there were no two completely identical houses, because each hut carried its own individuality and reflected the inner world of the family living in it.

For a child, a home is the first model of the outside big world; it “feeds” and “raises” the child, the child “absorbs” from the house the laws of life in the big adult world. If a child grew up in a bright, cozy, kind home, in a house in which order reigns, then this is how the child will continue to build his life. If there is chaos in the house, then there is chaos in the soul and in a person’s life. From childhood, the child mastered a system of ideas about his home - the house and its structure - the matitsa, the red corner, the female and male parts of the house.

Dom is traditionally used in Russian as a synonym for the word “homeland”. If a person does not have a sense of home, then there is no sense of homeland! Attachment to home and caring for it were considered a virtue. The house and the Russian hut are the embodiment of a native, safe space. The word “house” was also used in the sense of “family” - so they said “There are four houses on the hill” - this meant four families. In a Russian hut, several generations of the family lived and ran a common household under one roof - grandfathers, fathers, sons, grandchildren.

The interior space of a Russian hut has long been associated in folk culture as the space of a woman - she looked after it, restored order and comfort. But the external space - the courtyard and beyond - was the space of a man. My husband’s grandfather still recalls the division of responsibilities that was customary in the family of our great-grandparents: a woman carried water from a well for the house, for cooking. And the man also carried water from the well, but for cows or horses. It was considered a shame if a woman began to perform men's duties or vice versa. Since we lived in large families, there were no problems. If one of the women could not carry water now, then another woman in the family did this work.

The house also strictly observed male and female halves, but this will be discussed later.

In the Russian North, residential and economic premises were combined under the same roof, so that you can run a household without leaving your home. This is how the life ingenuity of the northerners, living in harsh, cold natural conditions, was manifested.

The house was understood in folk culture as the center of the main life values– happiness, prosperity, family prosperity, faith. One of the functions of the hut and house was a protective function. A carved wooden sun under the roof is a wish for happiness and prosperity to the owners of the house. The image of roses (which do not grow in the north) is a wish for a happy life. The lions and lionesses in the painting are pagan amulets that scare away evil with their terrible appearance.

Proverbs about hut

On the roof there is a heavy wooden ridge - a sign of the sun. There was always a household goddess in the house. S. Yesenin wrote interestingly about the horse: “The horse, both in Greek, Egyptian, Roman, and Russian mythology, is a sign of aspiration. But only one Russian man thought of putting him on his roof, likening his hut under him to a chariot" ( Nekrasova M, A. Folk art of Russia. – M., 1983)

The house was built very proportionally and harmoniously. Its design is based on the law of the golden ratio, the law of natural harmony in proportions. They built it without measuring instruments or complex calculations - by instinct, as their soul dictated.

A family of 10 or even 15-20 people sometimes lived in a Russian hut. In it they cooked and ate, slept, weaved, spun, repaired utensils, and did all household work.

Myth and truth about the Russian hut. There is an opinion that Russian huts were dirty, there was unsanitary conditions, disease, poverty and darkness. I used to think so too, that’s what we were taught at school. But this is completely untrue! I asked my grandmother shortly before she passed away, when she was already over 90 years old (she grew up near Nyandoma and Kargopol in the Russian North in the Arkhangelsk region), how they lived in their village in her childhood - did they really wash and clean the house once? a year and lived in the dark and in the dirt?

She was very surprised and said that the house was always not just clean, but very light and cozy, beautiful. Her mother (my great-grandmother) embroidered and knitted the most beautiful valances for the beds of adults and children. Each crib and cradle was decorated with her valances. And each crib has its own pattern! Imagine what kind of work this is! And what beauty is in the frame of each crib! Her dad (my great-grandfather) carved beautiful designs on all household utensils and furniture. She recalled being a child under the care of her grandmother along with her sisters and brothers (my great-great-grandmother). They not only played, but also helped adults. It used to be that in the evening her grandmother would tell the children: “Soon mother and father will come from the field, we need to clean the house.” And oh - yes! Children take brooms, rags, clean full order so that there is not a speck of dust in the corner, not a speck of dust, and all things are in their places. When mother and father arrived, the house was always clean. The children understood that the adults had come home from work, were tired and needed help. She also remembered how her mother always whitewashed the stove so that the stove would be beautiful and the house would be cozy. Even on the day of giving birth, her mother (my great-grandmother) whitewashed the stove, and then went to the bathhouse to give birth. The grandmother recalled how she, being the eldest daughter, helped her.

It was not like the outside was clean and the inside was dirty. They cleaned very carefully both outside and inside. My grandmother told me that “what appears on the outside is how you want to appear to people” (outward is the appearance of clothes, a house, a closet, etc. - how they look to guests and how we want to present ourselves to people clothes, appearance of the house, etc.). But “what’s inside is who you really are” (inside is the backside of embroidery or any other work, the backside of clothes that should be clean and without holes or stains, the inside of cabinets and others invisible to other people, but visible moments of our lives). Very instructive. I always remember her words.

Grandmother recalled that only those who did not work had poor and dirty huts. They were considered like holy fools, a little sick, they were pitied as people who were sick at heart. Those who worked - even if he had 10 children - lived in bright, clean, beautiful huts. Decorated your home with love. They ran a large household and never complained about life. There was always order in the house and yard.

Construction of a Russian hut

The Russian house (hut), like the Universe, was divided into three worlds, three tiers: the lower one is the basement, underground; middle – these are living quarters; the upper one under the sky is the attic, the roof.

Hut as a structure was a log house made of logs that were tied together into crowns. In the Russian North it was customary to build houses without nails, very durable houses. The minimum number of nails was used only for attaching decor - piers, towels, platbands. They built houses “as proportion and beauty dictate.”

Roof– the upper part of the hut – provides protection from the outside world and is the border between the inside of the house and space. No wonder the roofs were so beautifully decorated in houses! And the ornaments on the roof often depicted symbols of the sun - solar symbols. We know such expressions: “father’s roof”, “live under one roof”. There were customs - if a person was sick and could not leave this world for a long time, then so that his soul could more easily pass into another world, they would remove the ridge on the roof. It is interesting that the roof was considered a feminine element of the house - the hut itself and everything in the hut should be “covered” - the roof, buckets, dishes, and barrels.

Upper part of the house (rails, towel) decorated with solar, that is, sun signs. In some cases, the full sun was depicted on the towel, and only half of the solar signs were depicted on the sides. Thus, the sun appeared at the most important points on its path across the sky - at sunrise, zenith and sunset. In folklore there is even an expression “three-bright sun”, reminiscent of these three key points.

Attic was located under the roof and items that were not needed at the moment and removed from the house were stored on it.

The hut was two-story, the living rooms were located on the “second floor”, as it was warmer there. And on the “ground floor,” that is, on the lower tier, there was basement It protected living quarters from the cold. The basement was used for storing food and was divided into 2 parts: the basement and the underground.

Floor they made it double to preserve heat: at the bottom there was a “black floor”, and on top of it there was a “white floor”. Floor boards were laid from the edges to the center of the hut in the direction from the facade to the exit. This was important in some rituals. So, if they entered the house and sat on a bench along the floorboards, it meant that they had come to make a match. They never slept and laid the bed along the floorboards, since they laid the dead person along the floorboards “on the way to the doors.” That’s why we didn’t sleep with our heads towards the exit. They always slept with their heads in the red corner, towards the front wall, on which the icons were located.

The diagonal was important in the design of the Russian hut. “The red corner is the stove.” The red corner always pointed to noon, to the light, to God's side (the red side). It has always been associated with wotok (sunrise) and the south. And the stove pointed to sunset, to darkness. And was associated with the west or north. They always prayed to the icon in the red corner, i.e. to the east, where the altar in the temples is located.

Door and the entrance to the house, exit to the outside world is one of essential elements Houses. She greets everyone who enters the house. In ancient times, there were many beliefs and various protective rituals associated with the door and threshold of the house. Probably not without reason, and now many people hang a horseshoe on the door for good luck. And even earlier, a scythe (a gardening tool) was placed under the threshold. This reflected people's ideas about the horse as an animal associated with the sun. And also about metal, created by man with the help of fire and which is a material for protecting life.

Only a closed door preserves life inside the house: “Don’t trust everyone, lock the door tightly.” That is why people stopped at the threshold of the house, especially when entering someone else's house; this stop was often accompanied by a short prayer.

At a wedding in some places, a young wife, entering her husband’s house, was not supposed to touch the threshold. That is why it was often carried in by hand. And in other areas, the sign was exactly the opposite. The bride, entering the groom's house after the wedding, always lingered on the threshold. This was a sign of that. That she is now one of her own in her husband’s family.

The threshold of a doorway is the border between “one’s own” and “someone else’s” space. IN folk ideas it was a border place, and therefore an unsafe place: “They don’t say hello across the threshold,” “They don’t shake hands across the threshold.” You cannot accept gifts through the threshold. Guests are greeted outside the threshold, then let in ahead of them through the threshold.

The height of the door was below human height. When entering, I had to bow my head and take off my hat. But at the same time, the doorway was quite wide.

Window- another entrance to the house. Window is a very ancient word, first mentioned in chronicles in the year 11 and found among all Slavic peoples. In popular beliefs, it was forbidden to spit through the window, throw out garbage, or pour something out of the house, since “the angel of the Lord is standing under it.” “Give (to a beggar) through the window - give to God.” Windows were considered the eyes of the house. A man looks through the window at the sun, and the sun looks at him through the window (the eyes of the hut). That is why signs of the sun were often carved on the frames. The riddles of the Russian people say this: “The red girl is looking out the window” (the sun). Traditionally in Russian culture, windows in a house have always been oriented “toward the summer”—that is, to the east and south. The largest windows of the house always looked out onto the street and the river; they were called “red” or “slanting”.

Windows in a Russian hut could be of three types:

A) The fiberglass window is the most ancient type of window. Its height did not exceed the height of a horizontally placed log. But its width was one and a half times its height. Such a window was closed from the inside with a bolt that “dragged” along special grooves. That’s why the window was called “volokovoye”. Only dim light entered the hut through the fiberglass window. Such windows were more often found on outbuildings. Smoke from the stove was taken out (“dragged out”) from the hut through a fiberglass window. Basements, closets, sheds and barns were also ventilated through them.

B) Box window - consists of a deck made up of four beams firmly connected to each other.

C) A slanted window is an opening in the wall, reinforced with two side beams. These windows are also called “red” windows, regardless of their location. Initially, the central windows in the Russian hut were made like this.

It was through the window that the baby had to be handed over if children born in the family died. It was believed that this could save the child and ensure his long life. In the Russian North there was also a belief that a person’s soul leaves the house through a window. That is why a cup of water was placed on the window so that the soul that had left a person could wash itself and fly away. Also, after the funeral, a towel was hung on the window so that the soul would use it to ascend into the house and then descend back. Sitting by the window, they waited for news. The place by the window in the red corner is a place of honor, for the most honored guests, including matchmakers.

The windows were located high, and therefore the view from the window did not bump into neighboring buildings, and the view from the window was beautiful.

During construction, free space (sedimentary groove) was left between the window beam and the log of the house wall. It was covered with a board, which is well known to all of us and is called platband(“on the face of the house” = platband). The platbands were decorated with ornaments to protect the house: circles as symbols of the sun, birds, horses, lions, fish, weasel (an animal considered the guardian of livestock - they believed that if a predator was depicted, it would not harm domestic animals), floral ornaments, juniper, rowan .

From the outside, the windows were closed with shutters. Sometimes in the north, to make it convenient to close the windows, galleries were built along the main facade (they looked like balconies). The owner walks along the gallery and closes the shutters on the windows for the night.

Four sides of the hut facing the four cardinal directions. Appearance The hut is facing the outside world, and the interior is facing the family, the clan, the person.

Porch of a Russian hut it was often open and spacious. Here those family events took place that the entire street of the village could see: soldiers were seen off, matchmakers were greeted, newlyweds were greeted. On the porch they talked, exchanged news, relaxed, and talked about business. Therefore, the porch occupied a prominent place, was high and rose up on pillars or frames.

Porch – “ business card home and its owners,” reflecting their hospitality, prosperity and cordiality. A house was considered uninhabited if its porch was destroyed. The porch was decorated carefully and beautifully, the ornament used was the same as on the elements of the house. It could be a geometric or floral ornament.

What word do you think the word “porch” came from? From the word “cover”, “roof”. After all, the porch had to have a roof that protected it from snow and rain.
Often in a Russian hut there were two porches and two entrances. The first entrance is the front entrance, where benches were set up for conversation and relaxation. And the second entrance is “dirty”, it served for household needs.

Bake was located near the entrance and occupied approximately a quarter of the hut’s space. The stove is one of the sacred centers of the house. “The oven in the house is the same as the altar in the church: bread is baked in it.” “The stove is our dear mother,” “A house without a stove is an uninhabited house.” The stove had a feminine origin and was located in the female half of the house. It is in the oven that the raw, undeveloped is transformed into cooked, “our own”, mastered. The stove is located in the corner opposite the red corner. They slept on it, it was used not only in cooking, but also in healing, in folk medicine, small children were washed in it in winter, children and old people warmed themselves on it. In the stove, they always kept the damper closed if someone left the house (so that they would return and the journey would be happy), during a thunderstorm (since the stove is another entrance to the house, the connection between the house and the outside world).

Matica- a beam running across a Russian hut on which the ceiling is supported. This is the boundary between the front and back of the house. A guest coming to the house could not go further than the mother without the permission of the owners. Sitting under the mother meant wooing the bride. In order for everything to succeed, it was necessary to hold on to the mother before leaving home.

The entire space of the hut was divided into female and male. Men worked and rested, received guests on weekdays in the men's part of the Russian hut - in the front red corner, to the side of it towards the threshold and sometimes under the curtains. The man's workplace during repairs was next to the door. Women and children worked and rested, staying awake in the women's half of the hut - near the stove. If women received guests, then the guests sat at the threshold of the stove. Guests could only enter the women's area of ​​the hut at the invitation of the hostess. Representatives of the male half never entered the female half unless absolutely necessary, and women never entered the male half. This could be taken as an insult.

Stalls served not only as a place to sit, but also as a place to sleep. A headrest was placed under the head when sleeping on a bench.

The bench at the door was called “konik”, it could be the workplace of the owner of the house, and any person who entered the house, a beggar, could also spend the night there.

Above the benches, above the windows, shelves were made parallel to the benches. Hats, thread, yarn, spinning wheels, knives, awls and other household items were placed on them.

Married adult couples slept in beds, on a bench under the blankets, in their own separate cages - in their own places. Old people slept on the stove or near the stove, children - on the stove.

All utensils and furniture in a Russian northern hut are located along the walls, and the center remains free.

Svetlyceum The room was called a small room, a little room on the second floor of the house, clean, well-groomed, for handicrafts and clean activities. There was a wardrobe, a bed, a sofa, a table. But just like in the hut, all objects were placed along the walls. In the gorenka there were chests in which dowries for daughters were collected. There are as many marriageable daughters as there are chests. Girls lived here - brides of marriageable age.

Dimensions of a Russian hut

In ancient times, the Russian hut did not have internal partitions and was shaped like a square or rectangle. The average size of the hut was from 4 x 4 meters to 5.5 x 6.5 meters. Middle and wealthy peasants had large huts - 8 x 9 meters, 9 x 10 meters.

Decoration of a Russian hut

In the Russian hut there were four corners: stove, woman's kut, red corner, back corner (at the entrance under the curtains). Each corner had its own traditional purpose. And the entire hut, according to the corners, was divided into female and male halves.

Women's half of the hut runs from the furnace mouth (furnace outlet) to the front wall of the house.

One of the corners of the women's half of the house is the woman's kut. It is also called “baking”. This place is near the stove, women's territory. Here they prepared food, pies, utensils and millstones were stored. Sometimes the “women’s territory” of the house was separated by a partition or screen. On the women's side of the hut behind the stove there were lockers for kitchen utensils and food supplies, shelves for tableware, buckets, cast iron, tubs, oven equipment (bread shovel, poker, grip). The “long shop”, which ran along the women’s half of the hut along the side wall of the house, was also women’s. Here women spun, weaved, sewed, embroidered, and a baby’s cradle hung here.

Men never entered “women’s territory” and did not touch those utensils that are considered female. But a stranger and guest could not even look into the woman’s kut, it was offensive.

On the other side of the stove there was male space, "The male kingdom of the home." There was a threshold men's shop here, where men did housework and rested after working day. Underneath there was often a cabinet with tools for men's work. It was considered indecent for a woman to sit on the threshold bench. They rested during the day on a side bench at the back of the hut.

Russian stove

About a fourth, and sometimes a third, of the hut was occupied by a Russian stove. She was a symbol of home. They not only prepared food in it, but also prepared feed for livestock, baked pies and bread, washed themselves, heated the room, slept on it and dried clothes, shoes or food, and dried mushrooms and berries in it. And they could keep chickens in the oven even in winter. Although the stove is very large, it does not “eat up”, but, on the contrary, expands the living space of the hut, turning it into a multi-dimensional, multi-height space.

No wonder there is a saying “dance from the stove”, because everything in a Russian hut begins with the stove. Remember the epic about Ilya Muromets? The epic tells us that Ilya Muromets “lay on the stove for 30 and 3 years,” that is, he could not walk. Not on the floors or on the benches, but on the stove!

“The oven is like our own mother,” people used to say. Many folk healing practices were associated with the stove. And signs. For example, you cannot spit in the oven. And it was impossible to swear when the fire was burning in the stove.

The new oven began to be heated gradually and evenly. The first day began with four logs, and gradually one log was added every day to heat the entire volume of the stove and so that it was without cracks.

At first, Russian houses had adobe stoves, which were heated in black. That is, the stove then did not have an exhaust pipe for the smoke to escape. The smoke was released through the door or through a special hole in the wall. Sometimes they think that only beggars had black huts, but this is not so. Such stoves were also found in rich mansions. The black stove produced more heat and stored it longer than the white one. The smoke-stained walls were not afraid of dampness or rot.

Later, the stoves began to be built white - that is, they began to make a pipe through which the smoke came out.

The stove was always located in one of the corners of the house, which was called the stove, door, small corner. Diagonally from the stove there was always a red, holy, front, large corner of a Russian house.

Red corner in a Russian hut

The Red Corner is the central main place in the hut, in a Russian house. It is also called “saint”, “God’s”, “front”, “senior”, “big”. It is illuminated by the sun better than all other corners in the house, everything in the house is oriented towards it.

The goddess in the red corner is like the altar of an Orthodox church and was interpreted as the presence of God in the house. The table in the red corner is the church altar. Here, in the red corner, they prayed to the icon. Here at the table all meals and main events in the life of the family took place: birth, wedding, funeral, farewell to the army.

Here there were not only images, but also the Bible, prayer books, candles, branches of consecrated willow were brought here on Palm Sunday or birch branches on Trinity.

The red corner was especially worshiped. Here, during the wake, they placed an extra device for another soul who had passed into the world.

It was in the Red Corner that the chipped birds of happiness, traditional for the Russian North, were hung.

Seats at the table in the red corner were firmly established by tradition, not only during holidays, but also during regular meals. The meal united the clan and family.

• Place in the red corner, in the center of the table, under the icons, was the most honorable. Here sat the owner, the most respected guests, and the priest. If a guest passed by and sat in the red corner without the owner’s invitation, it was considered gross violation etiquette.
• The next most important side of the table is the one to the right of the owner and the places closest to him on the right and left. This is a "men's shop". Here the men of the family were seated according to seniority along the right wall of the house towards its exit. The older the man, the closer he sits to the owner of the house.
• And on the “lower” end of the table on the “women’s bench”, Women and children sat down along the front of the house.
• Mistress of the house was placed opposite the husband from the side of the stove on the side bench. This made it more convenient to serve food and host dinners.
• During the wedding newlyweds They also sat under the icons in the red corner.
• For guests It had its own guest shop. It is located by the window. It is still a custom in some areas to seat guests by the window.

This arrangement of family members at the table shows the model of social relations within the Russian family.

Table- he was given great importance in the red corner of the house and in the hut in general. The table in the hut stood on permanent place. If the house was sold, then it was necessarily sold along with the table!

Very important: The table is the hand of God. “The table is the same as the throne in the altar, and therefore you need to sit at the table and behave as in church” (Olonets province). It was not allowed to place foreign objects on the dining table, because this is the place of God himself. It was forbidden to knock on the table: “Don’t hit the table, the table is God’s palm!” There should always be bread on the table - a symbol of wealth and well-being in the house. They used to say: “Bread on the table is the throne!” Bread is a symbol of prosperity, abundance, and material well-being. That's why it always had to be on the table - God's palm.

A small lyrical digression from the author. Dear readers of this article! You probably think that all this is outdated? Well, what does bread have to do with it on the table? And you can bake yeast-free bread with your own hands at home - it’s quite easy! And then you will understand that this is a completely different bread! Not like store bought bread. Moreover, the loaf is shaped like a circle, a symbol of movement, growth, development. When for the first time I baked not pies or cupcakes, but bread, and my whole house smelled of bread, I realized what a real home is - a house where it smells... of bread! Where do you want to return? Don't have time for this? I thought so too. Until one of the mothers whose children I work with, and she has ten of them!!!, taught me how to bake bread. And then I thought: “If a mother of ten children finds time to bake bread for her family, then I definitely have time for this!” Therefore, I understand why bread is the head of everything! You have to feel it with your own hands and your soul! And then the loaf on your table will become a symbol of your home and will bring you a lot of joy!

The table must be installed along the floorboards, i.e. the narrow side of the table was directed towards the western wall of the hut. This is very important because... the direction “longitudinal - transverse” was given a special meaning in Russian culture. The longitudinal one had a “positive” charge, and the transverse one had a “negative” charge. Therefore, they tried to lay all the objects in the house in the longitudinal direction. This is also why they sat along the floorboards during rituals (matchmaking, as an example) - so that everything would go well.

Tablecloth on the table in the Russian tradition it also had a very deep meaning and forms a single whole with the table. The expression “table and tablecloth” symbolized hospitality and hospitality. Sometimes the tablecloth was called “bread-salter” or “self-assembled”. Wedding tablecloths were kept as a special heirloom. The table was not always covered with a tablecloth, but only on special occasions. But in Karelia, for example, the tablecloth had to always be on the table. For a wedding feast, they took a special tablecloth and laid it inside out (from damage). A tablecloth could be spread on the ground during a funeral service, because a tablecloth is a “road”, a connection between the cosmic world and the human world; it is not for nothing that the expression “a tablecloth is a road” has come down to us.

The family gathered at the dinner table, crossed themselves before eating and said a prayer. They ate sedately, and it was forbidden to get up while eating. The head of the family - a man - began the meal. He cut food into pieces, cut bread. The woman served everyone at the table and served food. The meal was long, leisurely, long.

On holidays, the red corner was decorated with woven and embroidered towels, flowers, and tree branches. Embroidered and woven towels with patterns were hung on the shrine. On Palm Sunday, the red corner was decorated with willow branches, on Trinity - with birch branches, and with heather (juniper) - on Maundy Thursday.

It's interesting to think about our modern houses:

Question 1. The division into “male” and “female” territory in the house is not accidental. And in our modern apartments there is a “women’s secret corner” - personal space as a “female kingdom”, do men interfere with it? Do we need him? How and where can you create it?

Question 2. And what is in the red corner of our apartment or dacha - what is the main spiritual center of the house? Let's take a closer look at our home. And if we need to fix something, we’ll do it and create a red corner in our home, let’s create it to truly unite the family. Sometimes you can find advice on the Internet to put a computer in the red corner as the “energy center of the apartment” and organize your workplace in it. I'm always surprised by such recommendations. Here, in the red - the main corner - be what is important in life, what unites the family, what carries true spiritual values, what is the meaning and idea of ​​​​the life of the family and clan, but not a TV or an office center! Let's think together about what it could be.

Types of Russian huts

Nowadays, many families are interested in Russian history and traditions and are building houses as our ancestors did. It is sometimes believed that there should be only one type of house based on the arrangement of its elements, and only this type of house is “correct” and “historic”. In fact, the location of the main elements of the hut (red corner, stove) depends on the region.

Based on the location of the stove and the red corner, there are 4 types of Russian huts. Each type is characteristic of a specific area and climatic conditions. That is, it is impossible to say directly: the stove has always been strictly here, and the red corner is strictly here. Let's look at them in more detail in the pictures.

The first type is the Northern Central Russian hut. The stove is located next to the entrance to the right or left of it in one of the rear corners of the hut. The mouth of the stove is turned towards the front wall of the hut (the mouth is the outlet of a Russian stove). Diagonally from the stove there is a red corner.

The second type is the Western Russian hut. The stove was also located next to the entrance to the right or left of it. But its mouth was turned towards the long side wall. That is, the mouth of the stove was located near the entrance door to the house. The red corner was also located diagonally from the stove, but food was prepared in a different place in the hut - closer to the door (see picture). A sleeping area was made on the side of the stove.

The third type is the eastern South Russian hut. The fourth type is the Western South Russian hut. In the south, the house was placed towards the street not with its facade, but with its long side. Therefore, the location of the furnace here was completely different. The stove was placed in the corner farthest from the entrance. Diagonally from the stove (between the door and the long front wall of the hut) there was a red corner. In eastern South Russian huts, the mouth of the stove was turned towards the front door. In western South Russian huts, the mouth of the stove was turned towards the long wall of the house, facing the street.

Despite the different types of huts, they observe general principle structures of Russian housing. Therefore, even if he found himself far from home, the traveler could always find his way around the hut.

Elements of a Russian hut and a peasant estate: a dictionary

In a peasant estate the farm was large - each estate had from 1 to 3 barns for storing grain and valuables. There was also a bathhouse - the building farthest from the residential building. Every thing has its place. This proverbial principle has always been observed everywhere. Everything in the house was thought out and arranged intelligently so as not to waste extra energy and time on unnecessary actions or movements. Everything is at hand, everything is convenient. Modern home ergonomics comes from our history.

The entrance to the Russian estate was from the street through a strong gate. There was a roof over the gate. And at the gate on the side of the street there is a bench under the roof. Not only village residents, but also any passerby could sit on the bench. It was at the gate that it was customary to meet and see off guests. And under the roof of the gate one could welcome them cordially or talk goodbye.

Barn– a separate small building for storing grain, flour, and supplies.

Bath– a separate building (the furthest building from a residential building) for washing.

Crown- logs of one horizontal row in the log house of a Russian hut.

Anemone- a carved sun attached instead of a towel to the gable of the hut. Wishing a rich harvest, happiness, and prosperity to the family living in the house.

Barn floor– a platform for threshing compressed bread.

Cage- design in wood construction, is formed by crowns of logs placed on top of each other. The mansions consist of several cages, united by passages and vestibules.

Chicken-elements of the roof of a Russian house built without nails. They said: “Chickens and a horse on the roof - it will be quieter in the hut.” This refers specifically to the elements of the roof - the ridge and the chicken. A water tank was placed on the chicken - a log hollowed out in the form of a gutter to drain water from the roof. The image of “chickens” is not accidental. The chicken and the rooster were associated in the popular mind with the sun, since this bird notifies about the sunrise. The crow of a rooster, according to popular belief, drives away evil spirits.

Glacier– the great-grandfather of the modern refrigerator – a room with ice for storing food

Matica- a massive wooden beam on which the ceiling is laid.

Platband– decoration of a window (window opening)

Barn– a building for drying sheaves before threshing. The sheaves were laid out on the flooring and dried.

Stupid– horse – connects the two wings of the house, two roof slopes together. The horse symbolizes the sun moving across the sky. This is a mandatory element of the roof structure, built without nails, and is a talisman for the house. Okhlupen is also called “shelo” from the word “helmet”, which is associated with home protection and means helmet ancient warrior. Perhaps this part of the hut was called “okhlupny”, because when put in place it makes a “pop” sound. Ohlupni were used to do without nails during construction.

Ochelye – this was the name of the most beautifully decorated part of the Russian women's headdress on the forehead (“on the brow”And also called part of the decoration of the window - the upper part of the “decoration of the forehead, brow” of the house. Ochelie - the upper part of the platband on the window.

Povet– a hayloft, you could drive here directly on a cart or sleigh. This room is located directly above the barnyard. Boats, fishing gear, hunting equipment, shoes, and clothes were also stored here. Here they dried and repaired nets, crushed flax and did other work.

Podklet– the lower room under the living quarters. The basement was used for storing food and household needs.

Polati- wooden flooring under the ceiling of a Russian hut. They settled between the wall and the Russian stove. It was possible to sleep on the floors, as the stove kept the heat for a long time. If the stove was not heated for heating, then vegetables were stored on the floors at that time.

Policemen– figured shelves for utensils above the benches in the hut.

Towel- short vertical board at the junction of two piers, decorated with the symbol of the sun. Usually the towel repeated the pattern of the hairstyles.

Prichelina- boards on the wooden roof of a house, nailed to the ends above the pediment (edge ​​of the hut), protecting them from rotting. The piers were decorated with carvings. The pattern consists of a geometric ornament. But there is also an ornament with grapes - a symbol of life and procreation.

Svetlitsa- one of the rooms in the mansion (see “mansions”) on the women’s side, in the upper part of the building, intended for needlework and other household activities.

Seni- a cold entrance room in the hut; usually the entryway was not heated. As well as the entrance room between the individual cages in the mansions. This is always a utility room for storage. Household utensils were stored here, there was a bench with buckets and milk pans, work clothes, rockers, sickles, scythes, and rakes. They did dirty housework in the entryway. The doors of all rooms opened into the canopy. Canopy - protection from the cold. was opening Entrance door, the cold was allowed into the hallway, but remained in them, not reaching the living quarters.

Apron– sometimes “aprons” decorated with fine carvings were made on houses on the side of the main facade. This is a board overhang that protects the house from precipitation.

Stable- premises for livestock.

Mansions- a large residential wooden house, which consists of separate buildings, united by vestibules and passages. galleries. All parts of the choir were different in height - the result was a very beautiful multi-tiered structure.

Russian hut utensils

Dishes for cooking, it was stored in the stove and near the stove. These are cauldrons, cast iron pots for porridges, soups, clay patches for baking fish, cast iron frying pans. Beautiful porcelain dishes were stored so that everyone could see them. She was a symbol of wealth in the family. Festive dishes were stored in the upper room, and plates were displayed in the cupboard. Everyday dishes were kept in wall cabinets. Dinnerware consisted of a large bowl made of clay or wood, wooden spoons, birch bark or copper salt shakers, and cups of kvass.

Painted baskets were used to store bread in Russian huts. boxes, brightly colored, sunny, joyful. The painting of the box distinguished it from other things as a significant, important thing.

They drank tea from samovar.

Sieve it was used for sifting flour, and as a symbol of wealth and fertility, it was likened to the vault of heaven (the riddle “A sieve is covered with a sieve”, the answer is heaven and earth).

Salt is not only food, but also a talisman. That’s why they served bread and salt to guests as a greeting, a symbol of hospitality.

The most common was earthenware pot. Porridge and cabbage soup were prepared in pots. The cabbage soup cooked well in the pot and became much tastier and richer. Even now, if we compare the taste of soup and porridge from a Russian oven and from the stove, we will immediately feel the difference in taste! Tastes better out of the oven!

For household needs, barrels, tubs, and baskets were used in the house. They fried food in frying pans, just like now. The dough was kneaded in wooden troughs and vats. Water was carried in buckets and jugs.

Good owners immediately after eating all the dishes were washed clean, dried and placed overturned on the shelves.

Domostroy said this: “so that everything is always clean and ready for the table or for delivery.”

To put the dishes in the oven and take them out of the oven you needed grips. If you have the opportunity to try to put a full pot filled with food into the oven or take it out of the oven, you will understand how physically difficult work this is and how strong women used to be even without fitness classes :). For them, every movement was exercise and exercise. I’m serious 🙂 - I tried it and appreciated how difficult it is to get a large pot of food for a large family using a grab handle!

Used for raking coals poker.

In the 19th century, metal pots replaced clay pots. They're called cast iron (from the word “cast iron”).

Clay and metal were used for frying and baking. frying pans, patches, frying pans, bowls.

Furniture in our understanding, this word was almost absent in the Russian hut. Furniture appeared much later, not so long ago. No wardrobes or chests of drawers. Clothes and shoes and other things were not stored in the hut.

The most valuable things in a peasant house - ceremonial utensils, festive clothes, dowries for daughters, money - were kept in chests. Chests always had locks. The design of the chest could tell about the prosperity of its owner.

Russian hut decor

A house painting master could paint a house (they used to say “bloom”). They painted strange patterns on a light background. These are symbols of the sun - circles and semicircles, and crosses, and amazing plants and animals. The hut was also decorated with wood carvings. Women weaved and embroidered, knitted and decorated their homes with their handicrafts.

Guess what tool was used to make carvings in a Russian hut? With an axe! And the painting of the houses was done by “painters” - that’s what the artists were called. They painted the facades of houses - pediments, platbands, porches, porches. When white stoves appeared, they began to paint the huts, partitions, and cabinets.

The decor of the roof pediment of a northern Russian house is actually an image of space. Signs of the sun on the racks and on the towel - an image of the path of the sun - sunrise, sun at its zenith, sunset.

Very interesting ornament decorating the piers. Below the solar sign on the piers you can see several trapezoidal protrusions - the legs of waterfowl. For the northerners, the sun rose from the water and also set in the water, because there were many lakes and rivers around, which is why waterfowl were depicted - the underwater and underground world. The ornament on the sides represented the seven-layered sky (remember the old expression - “to be in seventh heaven”?).

In the first row of the ornament there are circles, sometimes connected with trapezoids. These are symbols of heavenly water - rain and snow. Another series of images from triangles is a layer of earth with seeds that will wake up and produce a harvest. It turns out that the sun rises and moves across a seven-layer sky, one of which contains moisture reserves, and the other contains plant seeds. At first the sun does not shine at full strength, then it is at its zenith and finally sets down so that the next morning it begins its path across the sky again. One row of the ornament does not repeat the other.

The same symbolic ornament can be found on the platbands of a Russian house and on the decor of windows in central Russia. But window decoration also has its own characteristics. On the bottom board of the platband - uneven terrain hut (plowed field). At the lower ends of the side boards of the casing there are heart-shaped images with a hole in the middle - a symbol of a seed immersed in the ground. That is, we see in the ornament a projection of the world with the most important attributes for the farmer - the earth sown with seeds and the sun.

Proverbs and sayings about the Russian hut and housekeeping

• Houses and walls help.
• Every house is held by its owner. The house is being painted by the owner.
• What it’s like at home is the same for yourself.
• Make a stable, and then some cattle!
• Not according to the house is the lord, but the house according to the lord.
• It is not the owner who paints the house, but the owner who paints the house.
• At home, not away: once you’ve been there, you won’t leave.
• A good wife will save the house, but a thin one will shake it with her sleeve.
• The mistress of the house is like pancakes in honey.
• Woe to him who lives in a disorderly house.
• If the hut is crooked, the mistress is bad.
• As is the builder, so is the monastery.
• Our hostess is busy with work – and the dogs wash the dishes.
• To lead a house is not to weave bast shoes.
• In the house the owner is more than the bishop
• Getting a pet at home means walking around without opening your mouth.
• The house is small, but it doesn’t allow you to lie down.
• Whatever is born in the field, everything in the house will be useful.
• He is not an owner who does not know his farm.
• Prosperity is not determined by the place, but by the owner.
• If you don't manage a house, you can't manage a city.
• The village is rich, and so is the city.
• A good head feeds a hundred hands.

Dear friends! In this hut I wanted to show not just the history of the Russian home, but also to learn from our ancestors how to run a household - reasonable and beautiful, pleasing to the soul and eye, to live in harmony with both nature and your conscience. In addition, many points in relation to the house as the home of our ancestors are very important and relevant now for us living in the 21st century.

The materials for this article were collected and studied by me for a very long time, checked in ethnographic sources. I also used materials from the stories of my grandmother, who shared with me the memories of her early years of life in a northern village. And only now, during my vacation and my life - being in the countryside in nature, I finally completed this article. And I realized why it took me so long to write it: in the bustle of the capital in the usual panel house in the center of Moscow, with the roar of cars, it was too difficult for me to write about the harmonious world of the Russian home. But here, in nature, I completed this article very quickly and easily, with all my heart.

If you would like to learn more about the Russian home, below you will find a bibliography on this topic for adults and children.

I hope that this article will help you talk interestingly about the Russian house during your summer travels to the village and to museums of Russian life, and will also tell you how to look at illustrations to Russian fairy tales with your children.

Literature about the Russian hut

For adults

1. Bayburin A.K. Dwelling in rituals and performances Eastern Slavs. – L.: Science, 1983 (Institute of Ethnography named after N.N. Miklouho-Maclay)
2. Buzin V.S. Ethnography of Russians. – St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg University Publishing House, 2007
3. Permilovskaya A.B. Peasant house in the culture of the Russian North. – Arkhangelsk, 2005.
4. Russians. Series "Peoples and Cultures". – M.: Nauka, 2005. (Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology named after N. N. Miklukho-Maclay RAS)
5. Sobolev A.A. Wisdom of the ancestors. Russian yard, house, garden. – Arkhangelsk, 2005.
6. Sukhanova M. A. House as a model of the world // Human House. Materials of the interuniversity conference – St. Petersburg, 1998.

For children

1. Alexandrova L. Wooden architecture of Rus'. – M.: White City, 2004.
2. Zaruchevskaya E. B. About peasant mansions. Book for children. – M., 2014.

Russian hut: video

Video 1. Children's educational video tour: Children's Museum of Village Life

Video 2. Film about a northern Russian hut (Museum of Kirov)

Video 3. How to build a Russian hut: a documentary for adults

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A hut in the form of a caged wooden frame of various configurations is a traditional Russian dwelling for rural areas. The traditions of the hut go back to dugouts and houses with earthen walls, from which purely wooden log cabins without external insulation gradually began to rise.

A Russian village hut usually represented not only a house for people to live in, but a whole complex of buildings that included everything necessary for the autonomous life of a large Russian family: living quarters, storage rooms, rooms for livestock and poultry, rooms for food supplies (haylofts), workshop premises, which were integrated into one fenced and well-protected peasant yard from bad weather and strangers. Sometimes part of the premises was integrated under a single roof with the house or was part of a covered courtyard. Only baths, considered a habitat for evil spirits (and sources of fires), were built separately from the peasant estate.

For a long time In Russia, huts were built exclusively with the help of an ax. Devices such as saws and drills appeared only in the 19th century, which to some extent reduced the durability of Russian wooden huts, since saws and drills, unlike an ax, left the wood structure “open” for the penetration of moisture and microorganisms. The ax “sealed” the tree, crushing its structure. Metal was practically not used in the construction of huts, as it was quite expensive due to its artisanal mining (swamp metal) and production.

Since the fifteenth century, the Russian stove, which could occupy up to one quarter of the area of ​​the living part of the hut, became the central element of the hut's interior. Genetically, the Russian oven goes back to the Byzantine bread oven, which was enclosed in a box and covered with sand to retain heat longer.

The design of the hut, verified over centuries of Russian life, did not undergo major changes from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. To this day, wooden buildings are preserved, which are 100-200-300 years old. The main damage to wooden housing construction in Russia was caused not by nature, but by the human factor: fires, wars, revolutions, regular property limits and “modern” reconstruction and repair of Russian huts. Therefore, every day there are fewer and fewer unique wooden buildings around, decorating the Russian Land, having their own soul and unique identity.

Native penates, in which our ancestors were born, in which the life of the family took place, in which they died...

The name of the original Russian wooden house comes from the Old Russian "isba", which means "house, bathhouse" or "source" from "The Tale of Bygone Years...". The Old Russian name for a wooden dwelling is rooted in the Proto-Slavic "jьstъba" and is considered to be borrowed from Germanic "stubа". In Old German "stubа" meant " warm room, bathhouse."

Also in "Tales 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, connected by blood ties and the authority of a single ancestor - the head of the family. As a rule, the clan consisted of older parents - father and mother and their numerous sons with their wives and grandchildren, who lived in one 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 clan was too large, there was not enough space for everyone, then the hut with a warm fireplace grew with additional extensions - cages. Cage - unheated room, a cold hut without a stove, a log house extension to the main, warm dwelling. Young families lived in the cages, but the hearth remained the same for everyone; food common to the whole family was prepared on it - lunch or dinner. The fire that was 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 resolve the most important issues of life.

In ancient times huts were "black" or "chicken". Such huts were heated by stoves without a chimney. The smoke from the fire 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 Rus' in the 12th century. At first, rich, wealthy peasants lived in such huts with a stove and chimney, gradually all peasant classes began to adopt the tradition of building a hut with a stove and chimney, and already in the 19th century it was rarely possible to see a black hut, except perhaps only baths. they built in Rus' in black style until the twentieth century; just remember the famous song by V. Vysotsky “Bathhouse in black style”:

According to the number of walls in the hut, wooden houses were divided into four-walled, five-walled, cross-walled and six-walled.

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

Five-wall hut - log house with a fifth main transverse wall inside the log house, the most common type of hut in Rus'. The fifth wall in the log house divided the room into two unequal parts: most of was an upper room, the second served either as a vestibule or as an additional living area. The upper room served as the main room common to the whole family; there was a stove - the essence of the family hearth, which warmed the hut during harsh winters. The upper room served as both a kitchen and a dining room for the whole family.

Izba-cross- This log house with internal transverse fifth and longitudinal sixth walls. The roof in such a house was most often hipped (or, in modern terms, hipped), without gables. Of course, they built cross huts bigger size than ordinary five-wall buildings, for large families, with separate rooms separated by main walls.

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

Most often, huts in Rus' were built with a courtyard - additional wooden utility rooms. The courtyards in the house were divided into open and closed and were located away from the house or around it. In central Russia, open courtyards were most often built - without a common roof. All outbuildings: sheds, sheds, stables, barns, wood sheds, etc. stood at a distance from the hut.

In the north, closed courtyards were built, under a common roof, and panels lined with wood on the ground, along which one could move from one outbuilding to another without fear of getting caught in rain or snow, the territory of which was not blown by a draft wind. The courtyards, covered with a single roof, were adjacent to the main residential hut, which made it possible, during harsh winters or rainy autumn-spring days, to get from the warm hut to the woodshed, barn or stable, without the risk of being wetted by rain, covered with snow or being exposed to street drafts.

When building a new hut, our ancestors followed the rules developed over 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 behests of the ancestors was the choice of a place for the future hut. A new hut should not be built on a site where there once was a cemetery, road or bathhouse. But at the same time, it was desirable that the place for the new wooden house should already be inhabited, where people lived in complete prosperity, bright and dry.

The basic requirement for building material was the same - the log house was cut from: pine, spruce or larch. The future log house was erected, in the first year the log house was defended, and the next season it was finished and the family moved into the new wooden house with a stove. The trunk of the coniferous trees was tall, slender, easy to work with an ax and at the same time durable, the walls made of pine, spruce or larch retained heat well in the house in winter and did not heat up in the summer, in the heat, maintaining a pleasant coolness. At the same time, the choice of tree in the forest was regulated by several rules. For example, it was forbidden to cut down sick, old and dried out trees, which were considered dead and could, according to legend, bring illness into the house. It was forbidden to cut down trees that grew on the road or near roads. Such trees were considered “violent” and in a log house, such logs, according to legend, could fall out of the walls and crush the owners of the house.

You can read in detail about the construction of wooden houses in Rus' in the book written at the beginning of the 20th century by the famous Russian architect, historian and researcher of Russian wooden architecture M.V. Krasovsky. His book contains enormous material on the history of wooden architecture in Rus' from the most ancient times to the beginning of the 20th century. The author of the book studied the development of ancient traditions in the construction of wooden buildings from residential buildings to church temples, studied the techniques of constructing pagan wooden temples and temples. M.V. Krasovsky wrote about all this in his book, illustrating it with drawings and explanations.