Slovenian Traditional House

By

Boštjan šeruga

HALOŠKA ZIDANICA

Cottages usually stand above or between the vineyards, on wooded tracts, on southern slopes or in valleys. They are 4 – 5 m wide and 8 – 10 m long.

They are built from rough wooden brunos and the crevices are filled with moss. Walls are roughcasted with mud and whitewashed. That type of house is called “cimprana hiša.”

Wooden roofing is placed on the walls and covered with thatch. Chimney stands somewhere in the middle of the roof. Chimneys were usually made of wood, so the fires weren´t so rare.

The typical home had one larger room, called hiša, smaller room (hiška), small vestibule and black kitchen. Windows were small.

Beside the wood people often used argil to build a home, because it was a building material for poor people. They scraped the earth, mixed it with chopped straw, pressed all together with their feet and put the mixture between two logs. Then they liftted the logs and started doing the next wall. That´s how “butana hiša” was built. It was roughcasted with soaked soil and whitewashed.

HOW THE HOUSES WERE BUILT

The shape and construction of house depended upon form and structure of ground, climate and disposable material. They used wood of less quality than today, as the houses were small and swept with clay.

Houses usually don’t have basis, only elementary frame is sometimes stronger and made of oak’s beam. Instead of walls they used oak’s, beech’s and poplar’s wood. First they hewed beams, stacked them together horizontally and tied them with wood wedges. At the edges and contacts of transversed walls they splitted beams up and bind. That’s what we call general construction of blocks. The last two rows of beams were a little longer, as there on the top of jointed walls are two consoles which carry watershoot position.

They simply cut out the window openings into block walls and also connected door’s jamb with taps to the blocks. The rest of doors were made of boards, carpenter’s made of wood hinges and bolts.

Walls were from outside and inside swept with muddy, clayey roughcast. It was women’s job to smear and repair it. Swept walls were later whitewashed with lime and the lower belts coloured with grey. With clayey mixture they also coated attic, floors in the house and the corridor under the projecting roof. Kitchen walls were the only walls that were built of stone, but sometimes it was only the wall next to the fire, that separated kitchen from the house. Chimney were in most cases built of stone and through it the smoke was lifting up.

When they covered the roof they used wheat and rye straw, that mustn’t be damaged so they harvested it manually with sickle.

A TYPICAL RESIDENCE IN HALOZE

Vuk’s homestead ( Dobrina 11)
A wooden “cimprana” house with a kitchen with fireplace, a room with baker’s oven, balcony and thatched roof sits on a basement made from stone. It dates back to the Eighties of the 19th century.

Dominko’s homestead (Gorišnica 12)
Everyone is amazed by this 300 years old typical Pannonian house with its walls from logs still firmly standing. The builders had to be real masters of carpentry and “cimpranje” and roofing, as they were usually one and the same person.