Burdei
A burdei or bordei (Romanian: bordei, Ukrainian: бурдей)[1] is a type of pit-house or half-dugout shelter, somewhat between a sod house and a log cabin. This style is native to the Carpathian Mountains and forest steppes of Eastern Europe.
History
Neolithic
In the
Early middle ages
The term used by western historians, for burdei-type housing on the Lower Danube and in the Carpathians during the 6th–7th centuries AD, is
The Grubenhaus was erected over a rectangular pit, ranging in size from four square meters to twenty-five square meters of floor area. During the 6th and 7th centuries the sunken buildings east and south of the Carpathians, were under 15 square meters in floor surface.[3] The experiments of the Archeological Open-Air Museum in Březno near Louny have reconstructed the living and temperature conditions in the dug houses.[4]
The building experiment consisted of two houses, which were exact replicas of two sunken buildings excavated on the site, one of the late sixth or early seventh century, the other of the ninth. The sixth- to seventh-century feature was relatively large (4.20 x 4.60 m) and deep (80 cm under the original ground). The excavation of the rectangular pit represented some fifteen cubic meters of earth. The excavation, as well as other, more complex, operations, such as binding horizontal sticks on the truss or felling and transport of trees, required a minimum of two persons. The building of the house took 860 hours, which included the felling of trees for rafters and the overall preparation of the wood. Building the actual house required 2.2 cubic meters of wood (ash, oak, and beech). In itself, the superstructure swallowed two cubic meters of wood. Three to four cubic meters of clay were necessary for daubing the walls and reeds harvested from some 1,000 square meters, for the covering of the superstructure. Assuming sixty to seventy working hours per week and a lot more experience and skills for the early medieval builders, the house may have been built in three to four weeks.59 -Florin Curta.[3][5]
Eastern Europe
In countries like Romania or Ukraine, the burdei was built to constitute a permanent housing place and could accommodate a whole family. Thus, a burdei could have multiple rooms, typically a fire-room where the stove was installed, a cellar, and a living room.[6]
North America
This type of shelter was created by many of the earliest
...is the quaint brand-new village of Gnadenau, where there are some twenty small farmers, who have built the queerest and most comfortable cheap houses ever seen in the West, and with the least amount of timber, being merely a skeleton roof built on the ground and thatched with prairie-grass. They serve for man and beast, being divided on the inside by a partition of adobe.
— [8]
See also
- ASTRA National Museum Complex
- Culture of Romania
- Cucuteni-Trypillian culture
- Dugout (shelter)
- Earth sheltering
- Pit-house
- Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village
- Vernacular architecture of the Carpathians
- Village Museum
- Vernacular architecture
- Zemlyanka
Notes
- ^ "бурдей" in Etymolohichnyĭ Slovnyk Ukraïns′koï Movy (Etymological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language), O.S. Mel′nychuk, Vol. 1, 1982.
- OCLC 241363071.
- ^ a b Florin Curta The Making of Slavs p. 282
- ^ History
- ^ Pleinerová 1986:113–14 and 139. Various prohibitions (e.g., selection of the building site, propitious time for starting the building, etc.), as well as a number of ritual practices pertaining to the symbolism attached to the house, some of which are known from the ethnographic evidence, may have considerably delayed the building process.
- ^ Bordeiul Castranova, Dolj, Secolul al XIX-lea (English: Castranova Cottage, Dolj County, the 19th Century) (in Romanian).
- ISBN 978-0-8018-4189-7.
- ^ "A Short History of the Mennonite Immigration to Kansas" Archived August 27, 2011, at the Wayback Machine at the Hillsboro museum web site
External links
- Shelter from the Rain Article and pictures of Ukrainian burdeis in Canada.