* HOUSE *

 If you put the hut above the storeroom, such a structure can be called the house. There was a time when on the ground floor was kept cattle in the winter. From the hut into the storeroom was the ramp entrance. Later the storeroom turned into a simple basement. The gate was not from inside, but from the facade, straight from the street. Painted, sometimes iron-bound doors to the basement were made with the prospect of small store trade. Regardless, the cellars were an excellent place to store stuff.

 The house with a basement was almost a two-story, but truly two-story houses you can meet in the North very often. In such homes in the winter, a hut serves the lower part of the house, and there is no need to build a separate log house added to the side of the main building.

 The rear part of the house - the yard- was constructed less extensive and in two floors: downstairs housed a barn and stables. On the top were hayloft, storage rooms and stalls for fodder storage. If there was not enough space, hay was raised, put on poles, and placed on the truss girder. The yard is often built on poles, as sheds from the animal heat and moisture rotted quickly. Huts can be replaced without affecting the whole structure. The broad entrance on the beams was set up to the upper barn, where the horse could enter with a wagon. The size of the yard can be estimated by the fact that the horse carriage could turn around at the top of the barn. The entry was sometimes covered. The bottom of the entrance was made so that the wheels were rolling over the smooth surface, and for the horses' hooves were ledges in the middle, vaguely resembling steps.

 The entrance to the house was carried out by the internal stairs to the bridge connecting the front of the dwelling with a yard and the attic. A ladder often built portable, covered, on supporting poles, with handrails. Many homes had the staircase to the tower, the attic, where the room was cut in a summer mansard for the girls. The third stairs could be made from the top down to the barn. Behind the house, over the cowshed, built extra cold or warm spaces.

 Different types of houses are determined by building the front and the rear of the building. Often the winter quarters were portable, but the front part was divided with the fifth structural wall. The entrance from the bridge was into both halves of the front, or in one and into the second room. Sometimes the fifth wall was made not in the middle, and then a smaller room was usually cold: in the summer, there slept and stored edibles and other goodies in winter. Widely represented is a house with two identical buildings, standing back to back together under one roof. If they are not placed back to back, then the gap between the facade was equipped with doors and stairs. Exciting in the architectural sense was the union of two separated log houses into a coherent whole at the level of the tower and the second floor. In addition to the two basements and two large spaces of the second floor, in the front-on, as already mentioned, are often cut in another, the uppermost chamber, and then the house becomes, in essence, a three-story house. A room with a window usually would make a little balcony with railings, where the whole village was visible, and more ...

 Gulbishche - the porch (a deck with railings), built at the second-floor windows, is also part of ancient Novgorod and maybe even typical Russian architecture. For balconies, stairs and porches were manufactured as single wooden poles. Carved decorations on the facade were called "towels." The windows were framed with wood-carved casings.

 The height and spaciousness of Northern houses strike and raise some thought for everyone who wants an honest and sober look at the Russian past.

 But the building tradition, like the song tradition, is also interrupted. At the end of the XIX century was born the custom of covering the house's living quarters with boards. A house covered with wooden boards and painted lost something that connected it with the most ancient buildings like the old Novgorod architecture.

 Under the influence of urban, aristocratic, bourgeois and merchant styles, the interior of the peasant houses also changes. In the homes appeared wallpaper and people started to paint furniture and floors. Of course, such a mixture of domestic and aesthetic needs doesn't benefit a unified Northern style. Yet the Northern local architecture for a long time, we can say to this day, has retained its own characteristics, its astonishing originality.