Expedition to the Ancestors. What it costs us to build a village for the Slavs
The exterior of the model "Slavic Village" made by the author. Front view. It shows early morning in a small village of only two houses. The gates are wide open, and a guard is letting cows and horses out to pasture. The doors of the barn and stable are open. In the right corner, craftsmen are working with bellows, lighting a small blast furnace. There are boats at the pier on the rapids. A fisherman with a spear is standing in the water. The plot of the model is based on a picture from a textbook, but somewhat creatively altered...
The day was already drawing to an end,
and the twelve came to Jesus
and said:
- Let the people go,
so that they go
to the surrounding villages and settlements
and found themselves a place to stay and food,
because we are here in a deserted place.
Gospel of Luke 9:12
and the twelve came to Jesus
and said:
- Let the people go,
so that they go
to the surrounding villages and settlements
and found themselves a place to stay and food,
because we are here in a deserted place.
Gospel of Luke 9:12
History with their own hands. And it was so that many readers of VO wanted: A - to learn more about the “culture of the forest” and the features of wooden architecture, B - to get to know the history of housing better, and C - to read not only about the houses of the Indians, but also about the houses of our Slavic ancestors.
And it just so happened that everything came together, especially since I finally managed to finish the model of the ancient Slavic village, which the teacher of medieval history at the 6th linguistic gymnasium I already mentioned wanted to have, for which I began to make visual aids “from everything at hand” as an experiment.
Well, it is clear that it would be simply impossible to make a model of a Slavic village without thoroughly familiarizing yourself with the history of house-building in Rus'. So I had to do this, and now the work is finished, the model is ready and has been “put into service” in the school history room.
Its base was a foam block measuring 30x30 cm and 7 cm thick. A river bed was cut out of it, and the surface of the ground itself was covered with a layer of papier-mâché obtained from... soaked cardboard egg cartons. Pieces of this material were tightly laid on the foam and covered with a layer of PVA glue, after which the entire surface of the future model acquired a simply rock-hard quality, although it took quite a long time to dry. But the texture turned out to be good, and gluing all the other parts to it, especially the fence logs, turned out to be very easy.
Here it is – a fence made of logs. And the roofs covered with reeds are made of natural flax. It is used in kits to seal water pipes. And for modelers, it is sold by the SV-model company.
Speaking of logs...
In the model, which was made on a scale of 1:72, they were shashlik sticks, cut and sharpened to a different angle accordingly. They were also used to make log houses and outbuildings. That is, the model shows us a settlement, fenced with a fence, inside which there are two large wooden houses, somewhat recessed into the ground, a barn on pillars so that mice could not get in, a stable, and a cowshed. All this was wooden, and therefore it was made of wood.
View of the village from the river. In the yard you can see a shepherd who is driving animals out of the yard. To the left on the pillars is a barn. A ladder made of hewn logs leads to the water. Stakes are driven across the stream, here you can put fish traps and stretch a net…
Here it should be noted that forest peoples, namely in the forested part of the East European Plain the Slavic tribes lived, always treated the tree very sensitively, that the forest has always been a home, a breadwinner, and a place of rest for us. But does everyone know the names of different parts of the forest that have come to us from the depths of centuries?
For some reason, everyone knows that northern spruce forests are taiga. But in the past, this name was used only in Eastern Siberia. But in Rus', such a dense forest was called taiboloy and urman in Western Siberia. And the edge of the forest is not always the edge, but the ramenye!
The same pine forest had different names. In the marshy lowland it was myandach. On the dry hill there was a pine forest. Moreover, the pine tree in such a forest was called konda. Incidentally, this is where the word "kondovy" comes from. That is, a "kondovy" person is a "tree-man" who cannot be taught anything! But konda is the best tree for building a house - it is light, slender, and tarred at the root. True, kondovy pines grow for a long time - up to 350 years and more.
On the banks of the rivers there are floodplain forests, which were called uremy. Where the swamp borders on solid ground, there are birch groves. And the dry coniferous thickets in the middle of the swamps, always full of many birds, are kolki.
The grove, familiar to us by its name, is nothing more than a dry deciduous forest near a dwelling. A forest growing on a low, extended hill is a mane, and it really does resemble a horse's mane on the withers. Well, the wilderness is always a dense, impassable forest. Moreover, deciduous. And their most remote center is the caltus - even animals do not want to live there, it is so dark and scary.
But that’s what our ancestors said, but for us, a forest is still a forest, well, a grove... That’s all our memory of our ancestors.
And here's what's interesting: the largest buildings in Rus' were constructed from centuries-old trunks (three centuries or more), up to 18 meters long and more than half a meter in diameter. In Rus', especially in the Russian North, then called the Northern Territory, there were especially many such trees. Dense forests also belonged to "pagan peoples", for example, the Mordvins. But the word "pagan" meant something completely different from what it means today. In Latin, "pagan" means pagan. That is, these are peoples of the pagan faith. At first, our Slavic ancestors were also "pagan".
By the way, it was especially difficult for the authorities at that time to get to the North, and therefore both the old traditions and the old faith were preserved there longer. And along with them, the remarkable examples of the craftsmanship of ancient Russian architects.
By the way, the basis of this craft was just one single log, from which, in general, everything began. It became a kind of module of the construction art and... a natural unit of all measurements in buildings!
They chopped such logs (or rather, pine trees into logs!) in winter, while the day had not yet begun to lengthen, and the earth and trees in the forest were “asleep.” They were afraid to chop them later, believing that they would rot. But aspen and other deciduous forest trees, on the contrary, were chopped in the spring, when the sap began to flow. They explained this by the fact that then the bark comes off the log more easily, and the log itself, dried in the sun, becomes as strong as a bone.
As for the most ancient residential buildings of our ancestors, here too they were very strongly influenced by the natural-geographical factor. Thus, in the north, where there was a lot of timber and the soil was damp, wood has been the main building material since ancient times. That is why a house with a wooden floor, often raised above the ground, appeared there. But in the south, where there was often enough forest, but the soil was dry, up until the 0,5th-1th centuries, semi-dugouts dug into the ground by XNUMX-XNUMX m were a common dwelling.
The semi-dugout dwellings of the ancient Slavs in the 3th–4th centuries on the Dnieper had an almost square shape with sides no longer than XNUMX–XNUMX m. The roof of the house often rested directly on the ground. There were two technologies for constructing walls.
The first was when a log house was built directly in a dug hole. The walls were then covered with earth, which was firmly tamped.
The second technology was simpler: vertical posts were dug into the corners of the pit, behind which poles or planks (split logs) were placed in a horizontal position. For the sake of strength, two vertical grooves were made in these logs, and the cut ends of the poles or planks were inserted into them.
Because of this difference in construction techniques, semi-dugouts are divided into "log" and "pillar" constructions, with the oldest Slavic semi-dugouts almost always being log. After the 7th century, log constructions continued to predominate west of the Dnieper, while the pillar method became widespread to the east.
There were also other differences characteristic of certain tribes. Thus, in the 8th–10th centuries, the northern tribes built clay walls in their dugouts, and even painted them, while the Vyatichi tribes had wooden walls.
The entrance to such a semi-dugout was usually on the southern side. The reason is that no one even tried to make windows in the thick wooden and earthen walls. But a door facing the sunny, southern side could serve as an additional source of light and heat in the summer.
A corridor sunken into the ground led to such a door, with a staircase made of wooden planks, or even steps cut directly into the clay. The floors were made of tightly packed earth, and they were often coated with clay.
It is interesting that houses very similar to the dwellings of the Dnieper ancient Slavic tribes could be found in the 19th century in Danube Bulgaria, and ethnographers encountered them even in the middle of the 20th century. And the size of such dugouts was quite large. Fifteen to twenty people could live in them, that is, a large family. The gable roof was installed on horned logs with forks at the top.
The haystacks on the model (there are three of them) are made very simply - they are molded from self-hardening sculpting clay, then coated with PVA glue and sprinkled with a model grass mixture, after which each stack was additionally painted with acrylic red, just like the roofs of the houses, by the way!
It is also curious that such an ancient Slavic semi-dugout was brought out from under the ground into the light of God over many centuries, only eventually turning into a real house rising above the ground. That is, judging by the houses on the model, the "dugout period" for its inhabitants has already passed.
Both houses and the barn are decorated with carvings. That is, this is a fairly late settlement, which can be attributed to the 10th century.
To be continued ...
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