Kyiv mass housing of the XI-HIP centuries – a building with a wooden frame and clay filling the walls.

They are all the same type, although we see differences in detail. The nature of the images is conditional; these are not real sketches of the building, but original symbols, signs, designed to inform the viewer about the place of the depicted action. This is the aesthetic concept of medieval artists, who did not strive for an accurate and adequate to the nature of the image.

The city fortifications on the miniatures were marked by one tower with four teeth, the army – one horseman with a pyramid of helmets behind him. The urban landscape was embodied in the bottom of the building, which was, of course, a generalized type of building, typical of the ancient n city. The image was dictated by life, otherwise the viewer would not recognize the image.

A distinctive feature of those buildings is the vertical composition; the height of the house is significantly greater than the width, which is generally typical of medieval housing. As you know, the buildings of that time, which have survived to this day, have a ratio of height to width of 2: 1, 5: 2, 3: 1 and even 4: 1.

Most of the miniature town houses are depicted as three-story, rarely as four-story. In some places they seem to be two-story, but this is undoubtedly the creative style – different; sometimes the image claims to be more} detailed (here the floor usually has only one window), in other cases it is extremely schematic. In the latter case, the number of window openings depicted by simple dashes is usually three. Obviously, this is not accidental, because this is the number of windows in the street facade later enshrined in Magdeburg law.

Thus, the ancient Russian graphics show that the average urban building of ancient Russia had a vertical composition and was multi-storey (mostly three-story). It should be noted, by the way, that archaeological research in Novgorod gave the opportunity to architectural historians to offer interesting reconstructions. All residential buildings there turned out to be multi-storey. In Kyiv, at least two-storey buildings were recorded during the excavations of V. Khvoyka.

Construction. Kyiv mass housing of the XI-HIP centuries – a building with a wooden frame and clay filling the walls. This design is called “half-timbered” and in the early Middle Ages was widespread throughout Europe. True, there were log structures nearby, but the half-timbering definitely prevailed – at least in the upper part of the city.

The structural basis of the frame were steep pillars dug into the ground or cut into the ground beams, laid on the ground foundation; they were connected by transverse beams. To give the structure more rigidity, inclined bars were used, connecting the vertical and ground details of the frame. The number of support pillars could be different, in each case it was determined by the size of housing and its layout. The distance between adjacent pillars in the wall was 1 write my lab report for me free.5 – 2.0 m.

Good orientation in this regard is given by the pits of the pillars, which, as a rule, occur at the bottom of the deepened (and therefore better preserved) part. The irregularity of their placement, which confuses researchers, is apparent, because the layout of housing was generally not determined by the location of the deepening. The distance between the retaining columns of the lower floor along the perimeter is 1.5-2.0 m, but can be twice as large along the inner axes.

The nature of the filling of the walls, as can be guessed on the basis of ethnographic parallels (in Ukraine, the described construction in the people’s housing has survived to this day), could have the following options: b) filling with clay rollers ( sometimes – pre-fired); c) raw masonry; d) adobe masonry. The first two options were witnessed by archaeologists.

The diameter of the supporting structures ranged between 0.20 – 0.25 m. This is fixed by the size of the “pits of the steep columns. For the elm usually used thinner bars. Such ties provided the required strength of the frame.

Dimensions. The part sunk into the ground has a fairly fixed size – its walls mostly range from 3 to 4 meters. Less often there are much bigger deepenings. The width of the “couch” on the sides of the recess is more difficult to establish, but we can assume that it is unlikely to exceed 1-2 m. Sometimes one of the sides of the recess could be directly adjacent to the outer wall of the house.

It gives the researcher a lot to estimate the distance between neighboring “half-earthlings” – when there is confidence that they are simultaneous. In Kiev, it is from two to six meters. This confirms the above a priori assumption – with the caveat, however, that sometimes the size of the “couches” could exceed the average and reach three, four or more meters.

We make an elementary calculation: 3-4 m (deepening) + 1-4 m (“couches” on both sides) = 5-12 m (on the street facade). This width of the building was typical of medieval Europe (the buildings of Lviv, Tallinn, Polish cities, etc.).

The longitudinal axis, located at right angles to the streets, could be larger, but not much, because the length of the structure was limited by the possibility of lighting. The total area of ​​the building was somewhere from 50 – 60 to 100 – 120 sq.m. It should be noted that in Novgorod and Ladoga, where well-preserved log cabins, which allow to accurately determine the size of the building, residential buildings often had just such an area. Kyiv log cabins, well studied in Podil, convincingly confirm the proposed calculations.

The height of the houses and each of the floors should not be accurately measured. At times, it could fluctuate significantly. After all, the height was not limited either technically or economically. With a half-timbered structure, the increase of the floor by 0.5 – 1.5 m had almost no effect on the reliability of structural solutions or the cost of the building.

The proposed model, which corresponds to the average level of a residential building, takes figures close to the minimum (though not minimum). The sides of the recessed part are 3.0 and 3.5 m, the street facade is 6 m, the longitudinal facade of the first floor is 8 m, the height of the floors is 2.5 + 3.0 + 2.5 m.

Was the wooden frame plastered? We think so. The classic half-timbered building with a bare frame in our view is associated with Western Europe, especially Germany, where this technique is still used. In Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine, wooden structures were mostly covered with a layer of plaster. But the “Western European” version of the half-timbered house for the early Middle Ages was universal, and Russia was no exception.

This is evidenced in particular by ancient Russian miniatures. Some of them very clearly show open and colored half-timbered structures (for example, in the images of the arrival of Derevlyany ambassadors to Kyiv in 945, the defense of Pereyaslav in 1187). Taking into account these illustrations, we perceive differently the usual schematic drawings of city houses with ground drafts in place of the floor slabs. Obviously, these are not cornices, but half-timbered details, open to the eye and visually emphasized.

Removals of the upper floors. This is a specific feature of medieval half-timbered construction, its purpose – to make the most of the area inside the city fortifications. By removing the upper floors along the street facade outside the plinth, the builders significantly increased the internal area at the expense of the street, without interfering with the movement of pedestrians and riders. We can assume that the use of cantilever structures was not alien to Kievan Rus (in particular Kyiv).

The probability of this is again confirmed by the miniatures of the Radziwill Chronicle. Thus, the picture of the return of Mstislav Izyaslavych in 1152 after the victory over the Polovtsians shows a very interesting half-timbered building with a characteristic cantilever removal. Another miniature (sheet 230) shows a rather complex building with several consoles.

Roof. Dwelling houses in Kievan Rus were covered with volatile materials that are not stored in the ground. The tile, despite the significant Byzantine influence, was not fixed here. During excavations, skull fragments are sometimes found, but so rarely that one has to speak of an exception rather than a tradition. Only the most prominent buildings had an expensive metal (oil) roof.

Based on the ethnographic tradition, we can assume that the main roofing materials in medieval Russia were straw, reeds and wood (shingles). Straw covered mostly peasant houses; in the city it was less suitable, primarily for fire safety reasons, but also because for the ancient burghers farming was only a secondary affair, so they had little straw. Reeds on the banks of the fleeting Dnieper did not grow densely. There was a tree that we had, we can say, universal use. So shingles were the most commonly used roofing material in the city. The miniatures often show roofs, densely outlined with rectangular scales. It is not a tile, but wooden boards – shingles.

The coating material determined the design and angle of the roof. Shingles need a steep enough slope to ensure rapid and complete drainage of rainwater and sliding snow. Such shingles cover castle towers, wooden churches and other buildings of later times.

The high ridge combined with the width of the building determined the presence of a large attic, which, no doubt, was used by residents mostly for economic purposes, and sometimes – as housing. These rooms had auditory windows or, as we often see in miniatures, and ordinary windows.

Heating. Due to the rather severe slumber of Kyiv, the problem of heating was one of the most important. Each house and each floor had its own stove. The design and dimensions of ancient Russian furnaces are well known to archaeologists. The length of the blade was usually 0.6-1.0 m, although there were larger, mainly in industrial furnaces.

All stoves had a chimney. There was a round hole in the palate for the smoke to escape, through which it was drawn into the chimney. Remains of chimneys are sometimes lucky to be found during archeological excavations, for example – in Vshchyzh (B. Rybakov’s research). Two chimneys above the crest of the house on one of the miniatures of the Radziwill Chronicle are clearly visible.

Ethnographic material makes it possible to reconstruct the simplest and, obviously, the most common chimney. It was a chimney – a wicker channel covered with clay.