FATHER'S HOUSE

SMOKE

“My home is my fortress” - the Cossacks could rightfully subscribe to this saying. The Cossack dwelling combined both a habitat and a defensive structure. In addition, it clearly shows the features of the most ancient and original history. The Cossack kuren is another argument against the theory about the origin of the Cossacks from the fugitive population of Russia.
The name "kuren" is Mongolian. The word “smoking,” that is, blowing light smoke, to which the name of the Cossack dwelling is sometimes attributed, has nothing to do with it. The word "kuren" means "round", even more broadly - "harmonious". The Mongols called a kuren a nomadic camp surrounded by carts. The detachment that defended this fortified camp was also called kuren. The word was used in this meaning among the Cossacks. The Cossacks and Kubans called a regiment a kuren.
People have lived on the Don, on the Dnieper, in the Caucasus, on the Terek since ancient times. The simplest dwelling was a half-dugout, covered with reeds or straw. Steppe nomads lived in “wagons” (yurts) or booths. Cossacks still set up such tents - booths - in their meadows or field camps.

Kuren in its classic, ancient form, forgotten already in the times of the Polovtsians and unknown to the Cossacks, is a hexagonal or octagonal log yurt, which is still found in Yakutia.
The design of the traditional Cossack dwelling, which they call a kuren, was influenced by the river culture of the Lower Don and Ciscaucasia, which, using the same construction techniques, makes these distant places related to Dagestan and the Caspian region.
The first settlements arose in floodplains - river reed thickets, where you can’t dig a dugout - the water is close. Therefore, the dwellings were made of turkish ones. The walls were woven from two rows of twigs or reeds, and the space between them was filled with earth for warmth and strength. The roof was definitely reed, with a hole for the smoke to escape.
But it was not possible to live in such buildings everywhere either. Wide, many-kilometer river floods required special buildings - piles. Memories of them are preserved in the names. “Chiganaki” is a building on stilts. And the people of the “Chig” tribe lived in them. It is no coincidence, apparently, that the Upper Don Cossacks are teased with “chiga vostropuzoy”.
The features of a pile construction are easy to read in a modern Cossack dwelling. The Cossack kuren is two-story. Most likely, this is not a “basement” that has grown to the second floor, but a memory of the stilts on which dwellings once stood. The most ancient settlements of the Khazars were located in the lower reaches of rivers. And quite recently, in Cherkassk, in the spring and autumn, Cossacks visited each other on boats, and the town itself was impregnable during periods of floods.

The modern kuren is two-story, “half-stone,” that is, the first floor is brick (formerly adobe, made of raw brick), the second is wooden.
The further north you go, the lower the first floor.
And on the Seversky Donets it looks more like a basement, although the characteristic features of a Cossack building are visible here too. The first floor, as a rule, is not residential, but utility. It was believed that “you need to live in a tree, and store supplies in a stone.”
In the center of the first floor there is a room without windows, which the Don Cossacks call “cold” (maybe this is where the word migrated to the name of the pre-trial detention cell that was in every village), the Kuban people call it “topping up” (that is, lower, “down”, in contrast to the upper room: “mountain” - high, upper). Construction techniques developed over centuries made it possible to build the refill in such a way that a light draft of air that had cooled in the surrounding “cold” chambers constantly blew through it. Oh, how sweet the smell of bunches of herbs, mountains of apples, watermelons, grapes hanging on threads in the wind! And the whole family gathers, spreading felt felt on the cool clay floor, drinking “uzvar” or eating ice-cold sizzling salted watermelons at noon, in the very heat, when the sizzling sun floats over the steppe in a dusty haze of heat.
The chambers border the perimeter of the cold room with a narrow corridor.
Once upon a time, weapons were stored in niches here. A narrow single door (necessarily opening inward so that it could be easily supported with a log or stone) led to the first, recessed floor. You could only enter here one at a time, bending under the low ceiling, and immediately plummet two steps down: my home is my fortress. And in the old days it was possible to crash even lower: right in front of the door they built a “hunter’s cellar” - a pit with a stake in the middle, closed in normal times with a wooden shield. An enemy who burst into the kuren immediately ended up there. Isn’t that where Kondraty Bulavin shot back from his enemies? In general, strangers did not go to this part of the smoking area.
Guests usually climbed wide steps (“thresholds”) to the second floor and found themselves on the “balusters” - a balcony-gallery, terrace, which sometimes surrounded the entire house. In the houses of the Caucasian Cossacks, this staircase to the second floor was easily removed, and the lower door was locked with a log from the second floor.
Like the nomadic yurt, the kuren was clearly divided into left, female, and right, male halves. Directly behind the entrance is the largest room, the hall where guests were received. There was the best furniture and the best dishes here.
In the small hut, the main core around which the rooms were located was the rude stove. To the right of it was the kunatskaya, where the unmarried sons of the owner, the head of the family, lived in barracks-like simplicity. To the left are the girls', children's and cooking rooms. The left side is warmer.
In the large kuren of a rich Cossack, all the rooms were strictly separated. Women and small children never entered the kunatskaya: there were weapons there and they could get hurt. Children did not enter their parents' room without permission.
The roofs of the kuren were reeds or straw. Such a roof lasts forty years without repair. One problem - it burns like gunpowder. And this forced the Cossacks to spend money on iron. A hot iron roof is excellent for drying fruit.

ESTATE

“Every Cossack is a sovereign in his own court,” says the proverb. If from a legal point of view this was indeed the case, and even the ataman could not enter the Cossack’s yard without the owner’s permission, there were still regulations that were strictly followed by all “citizens of the village society.” The first such requirement-custom was: for each service - a separate building, that is, a separate stable - the most expensive building in the estate (sometimes more expensive than a chicken barn), as a rule, stone - brick, separately - a cowshed, a chicken coop, a pigsty, etc. Several courtyards: in front of the kuren there is a base (Turkic: sandy), behind the kuren there is a levada, and the kuren itself has a porch on the street, windows on the field - just like the Cossacks went to sleep around the fire: facing towards the enemy. There are vegetable gardens in the back. But vineyards, orchards and melon fields in villages and large farmsteads were not located in estates, but separately, in specially designated convenient places. Allotments for garden plots and vineyards were cut there. They were either common - farmstead, stanitsa, or privately owned. Land was allocated for melons and distributed in shares annually.
This placement of the estate and farms was explained by the relative abundance of free land, the reluctance of the villagers to live “in oppression” (they would rather move to farms than to reduce the estate territory) and the fear of fire.

COOK

With the arrival of spring, for the sake of fiery fear, they stopped cooking in the smoking areas, and the entire kitchen migrated to the summer kitchen - cooking.
The stove in the summer kitchen was the same as in the smoking room, maybe a little smaller. No one slept on it, and it did not serve for heating. Although they could wash in it. It was heated with rubbish, straw, corn husks, and most often with dung. The dung was made (trampled) in the distant backyard from manure and chopped straw. The resulting mass was molded or cut and dried. The resulting fuel was stored like woodpiles in northern Russia.
The dung burned hot and produced a special ash that retained the heat for a long time. The entire Cossack kitchen is designed for the temperature regime of combustion of dung.
A distinctive feature of the kitchen and all Cossack housing was sterile cleanliness. They kept a lot of livestock, and in the absence of cleanliness, life in the kuren and at the base would have been impossible. The stove was whitened after each cooking - a bucket of white and kvach always stood under the stove. Above the stove vent, the hub, which was closed with a black iron damper, there was always a piece of mirror smeared: the cook could look to see if it was smeared with soot. Next to the summer kitchen there was a fireplace on which stood a three-legged tagan, and on it either a cauldron (a cauldron with a large bottom) or rings of different diameters for placing cast iron. Here samovars were placed and iron gear stood: samovar pipes, stove dampers, grips (slings), frying pans (chapalniks). The stove in the summer cook looked elegant: it was decorated with a blue border, in those places where clay or pebbles could be used, the stove was painted with images of horses, Cossacks, and flowers. Every Saturday, the children of a cheerful Cossack woman built new “Babylons” on the bleached sides of the stove... On Sundays the stove was not heated and the food was heated on a tagan.
There was a table next to the stove so that the food was “piping hot.” And a few steps from the cooking room there was a cellar, or cellar, where meat and dairy products were stored in the cold and on ice. Bundles of onions, peppers, and dried fish hung above the summer cooking area under a canopy. All this blazed in the sun with golden or scarlet sides, teasing the appetite. With all the diversity of Cossack cuisine (food cannot be the same in the territory from the Carpathians to the Pacific Ocean), there are common features for all Cossack cuisine. The main thing is that it is preferable to cook the product whole. This applies not only to sheep, piglets, geese and other birds. Even cabbage is fermented with whole heads of cabbage. All side dishes and seasonings are served separately.

Almazov, B. Cossacks. Father's House / B. Almazov, V. Novikov. - St. Petersburg: Golden Age, 2013. - P.36-43.

Cossack Don: Five centuries of military glory Author unknown

Dwellings and estates of the Don Cossacks

The dwellings of different peoples, despite their great diversity, can be reduced to a limited number of types. Residential buildings are divided according to the characteristics of vertical and horizontal development, layout, relationship and connection of buildings included in the housing complex.

To the buildings of the Don Cossacks M.A. Ryblova used a systematization based on three characteristics: the shape of the dwelling (round, square, rectangular), the presence or absence of auxiliary premises and structure (the method of organizing the space of the main room).

In accordance with these characteristics, she identified 10 groups of buildings, reduced to square, genetically ascending to round (single-chamber with a hearth in the center - shish) and rectangular.

When enlarged and regrouped, the first type includes square single-chamber ones with a hearth in the center - kuren, dugout; the same with an attached auxiliary room - smoking room with storage room. This last, later view, transformed by partitions (which could have been capital) and moving the furnace, is called round house.

Rectangular single-chamber with a “diagonal” structure are called hut, hut; similar structure with an attached auxiliary room - hut or hut with storage room. In case the auxiliary premises are connected with the residential premises. that's what they called him lingering or communications hut.

Rectangular dwellings (diagonal structure) with attached rooms were transformed due to the wall ( five-walled) or partitions ( outbuilding).

Various types of residential buildings have their own names among the Cossacks: dugout, figalek, hligel, figel(outbuilding), chicken(Also ku?ren), house, five-walled building, hut. The names are common mainly in the upper Don districts hut, communication, broach/communication hut, hut, hut.

Residential wooden houses on stilts or a stone base - “podkleti” (stone bottoms and log tops), as well as entirely stone ones, according to historians, appeared on the Don at the end of the 17th–18th centuries. The lower floor (“hamshenik”) was used for utility rooms. From the outside, a high staircase led into the house, turning into a “gallery” (a balcony closed on all sides). As noted by V.D. Sukhorukov, “both architecture and decoration... have some strange mixture of Asian forms with ancient Russian taste.” According to his own information, in the 20s. XIX century out of 924 houses in the village of Starocherkasskaya, 100 were made of stone.

There are several stone residential buildings from the 18th century left in Cherkassk. One of the most interesting is the Zhuchenkovs’ house. It reminds us of a kind of fortress: thick old walls, narrow, inward-sloping windows of the lower floor, protected by wrought-iron bars. The house had a Dutch oven decorated with colored tiles.

The “classic” Cossack kuren is a square house in plan on a basement (with a stone base), on stilts (relatively rare) or with “bottoms” and wooden “tops” covered with a hipped roof. According to A.G. Lazarev, the “bottoms” are deepened into the ground (up to 1 m), and their external ground wall with two to four openings reaches 1.5–2 m in height. They were covered with beams protruding up to 1 m, so that a bypass gallery or veranda could be arranged.

To build the “tops,” as a rule, round timber split in half was used - oak, pine, and less often imported larch. The interior decoration was made with pine boards, the exterior with alder. The height of the walls as a whole was about 3 m. The hearth was often located in the center of the house, divided by walls “crosswise”. The rooms communicated in a circle.

There were at least three windows and a front porch with a door along the façade. On one of the end adjacent main facades there was a working porch. There were windows on at least three walls of the house.

The hipped roof was often made without dormer windows. To illuminate and ventilate the attic space, light openings and ventilation holes were installed in the eaves. Fruits, herbs, fish and other supplies were dried and stored in the attic. Until the middle of the 19th century. the roof was covered with reeds (reeds, chakan) or aspen planks. In the second half of the century - with steel roofing sheets, which was affordable to wealthy Cossacks.

The design of the housing elements was such that it made it possible to disassemble them and move them to another place, which was often used by the Cossacks when moving a village or farm to a new location. In the early 50s. XX century During the creation of the Tsimlyansk Reservoir, a significant part of the traditional dwellings were moved from the flood zone to other places.

Cornices, window openings, and porches were decorated with sawn carvings. It was carried out by carpenters from central Russia and Ukraine. The elements of the ornament were, as defined by A.G. Lazarev, ivy leaf, “lamb” (a combination of teeth and arches), horns (horizontally located Greek accolade), “vine”, rhombus, triangle or arrowhead, straight and oblique cross, arrow. At the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. the ornamental rows are crowned with symmetrically located images of birds and fish (sturgeon). The corners of the house were “protected” by stylized solar signs and “thunder” arrows.

Variations on this basic type of dwelling involve either converting the downstairs into a full-fledged living floor (two-story houses with an upstairs and downstairs) or converting the gallery into a simple veranda supported by vertical posts. The veranda, unlike the bypass gallery, was often one-sided.

Along with the kuren, a house was sometimes built in the upper reaches of the Don connection, when two living spaces (sometimes with internal partitions) were connected by a hallway and a closet. Such a house was heated by two fireplaces. Despite the autonomy of the halves, the doors, just like in the kuren, connected the rooms in a circle. Connection known among Russian Old Believers living on the Danube (Lipovan), and among peasants on the Russian-Ukrainian borderland. Such houses were built by the Cossacks of the Orenburg army, including the Nagaibaks (baptized Tatars who served in Cossack units).

The Cossack square 2-story house with “bottoms” and “tops” (and a hipped roof) is common throughout the Don, but in the Lower Don, according to our observations, mainly in areas where Old Believers settled. Such a house sometimes arises as a result of the development of the basement.

Typical manor buildings can be considered 3-, 4-room round house and one-, two-room outbuilding(hligel). Five-walled common among poor people. This type comes from a two-chamber dwelling (room and vestibule).

Impoverished Cossacks sometimes huddled in adobe or frame dwellings, similar in size and design to peasant huts. The rich, on the contrary, built brick houses, maintaining the traditional shape and layout of the kuren.

In the interior decoration of the house, the Cossacks adopted a lot from the highlanders, Tatars and other peoples. Walls upper rooms(or halls) decorated carpets. Weapons and horse harnesses were hung on them. Family portraits (photos in the 20th century) and paintings were placed in free areas. Pillows with lace inserts were stacked on the beds - stitched. The lace edge of the sheet was visible from under the bedspread - valance. If the bed was in the upper room, the young did not sleep on it until the birth of the child; only occasionally was this place offered to a guest. In one of the corners of the room there was a holy corner with icons, which should have been visible from the entrance. A table covered with a tablecloth was placed under the icons (as a rule, only church books were placed on it). There were several icons; the quality of writing and the richness of their decoration (for example, the presence of a silver frame - vestments) was determined by the wealth of the owner. In the upper room there was a cabinet - “postav”, slide- for dishes. The most valuable porcelain, glass and silver objects were placed behind glass doors. They used clay and metal utensils every day: makhotkas, makitras, jugs, cups, bowls; knives, spoons, tongs, coffee pots, samovars. Every house had at least one rare item brought by the owner from afar (copper and silver vessels, dishes, art glass, etc.).

The main types of estates can be reliably described as they existed from the middle of the 19th century. The Cossack nobles of the Don Army arranged their residences in accordance with the traditions of the Russian landed nobility: they built large houses in the classical style, outbuildings, buildings for servants, and laid out a park with a fence and entrance gates facing the river. House churches or chapels were also a mandatory attribute. An example is the estates of M.I. Platov, in particular, the Mishkinskaya Dacha is accessible for visiting.

The estate of an ordinary Cossack was, in fact, open, since a fence of wickerwork or low “walls” made of local stone (shell rock, sandstone) without mortar was more of a boundary than a protection. In the front part there was a flower garden, part of the orchard, and the facade of the kuren with a front porch, veranda or gallery overlooked here. Household part with a well, cellar, summer kitchen or stove - rude, the sheds were located behind the smoking area or on the side from the non-front entrance; behind it, in the third part, there is a garden and a vineyard. Barnyard ( bases), as a rule, separated by a fence.

According to M.A. Ryblova, in the mid-19th – early 20th centuries. There were three main types of estates common on the Don: merged - with a direct connection between residential and outbuildings (northern districts); unintegrated - with outbuildings located freely and a residential building placed parallel to the street (everywhere); “courtyard-kuren” - with the same free arrangement of outbuildings and a house in the back of the yard.

It should be noted that the traditional dwellings and estates of the Don Cossacks have broad analogies in the everyday culture of the Slavs, the peoples of the Volga region, and the old-timers of Siberia. However, upon careful examination, they reveal design, finishing and other features that make it possible to unmistakably distinguish Cossack houses and estates from the general array of buildings.

The main type of housing that dominated the development was smoking(with the central position of the hearth and circular communication of rooms) - in its origin goes back to the organization of semi-nomadic sites, known from descriptions and medieval archaeological sites (Tsimlyanskoye fortified settlement) and the archaic type of dwellings.

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“My home is my fortress” - the Cossacks could rightfully subscribe to this saying. The Cossack dwelling combined both a habitat and a defensive structure. In addition, it clearly shows the features of a unique ancient history. The Cossack kuren is another argument against the theory about the origin of the Cossacks from the fugitive population of Russia.

Let's try to consider an alternative version using a description of the Cossacks' home.

People have lived on the Don, on the Dnieper, in the Caucasus, on the Terek since ancient times. The simplest dwelling was a half-dugout, covered with reeds or straw. The steppe nomads lived in “kibitki” (yurts) or booths. Cossacks still put up such tents - booths - in their meadows or field camps. Kuren in its classic, ancient form, forgotten already in the times of the Polovtsians and unknown to the Cossacks, is a hexagonal or octagonal log yurt, which is still found in Yakutia.

The design of the traditional Cossack dwelling, which they call a kuren, was influenced by the river culture of the Lower Don and the Caucasus, which, using the same construction techniques, makes these distant places related to Dagestan and the Caspian region.

The first settlements arose in the floodplains - river reed thickets, where you can’t dig a dugout - the water is close. Therefore, the dwellings were made of turkish ones. The walls were woven from two rows of twigs or reeds, and the space between them was filled with earth for warmth and strength. The roof was definitely reed, with a hole for the smoke to escape. But it was not possible to live in such buildings everywhere either. Wide, many-kilometer river floods required special buildings - piles. Memories of them are preserved in the names. “Chiganaki” is a building on stilts. And the people of the “Chig” tribe lived in them. It is no coincidence, apparently, that the Upper Don Cossacks are teased with “chiga vostropuzoy”.

The features of a pile construction are easy to read in a modern Cossack dwelling. The Cossack kuren is two-story. Most likely, this is not a “basement” that has grown to the second floor, but a memory of the stilts on which dwellings once stood. The most ancient settlements of the Khazars were located in the lower reaches of rivers. And quite recently, in Cherkassk, in the spring and autumn, the Cossacks went to visit each other on boats, and the town itself was impregnable during periods of floods.

Modern Cossack kuren

The modern kuren is two-story, “half-stone,” that is, the first floor is brick (formerly adobe, made of raw brick), the second is wooden. The further north you go, the lower the first floor. And on the Seversky Donets it looks more like a basement, although the characteristic features of a Cossack building are visible here too. The first floor, as a rule, is not residential, but utility. It was believed that “you need to live in a tree, and store supplies in a stone.”

But already at the beginning of the 20th century, the owners of the kurens hastily cleaned the upper floor. This was due to the dispossession of the Don Cossacks (1929). Such a house was less noticeable and less flashy. After the war, houses were built from wooden plates and later - brick ones, in which there were practically no elements of the Cossack kuren left.

The name “kuren” is Mongolian. The word “smoking,” that is, blowing light smoke, to which the name of the Cossack dwelling is sometimes attributed, has nothing to do with it. The word “kuren” means “round”, even more broadly it means “harmonious”. If you try to “dismember” this word and translate it, this is what you get: “smoking” - a circle, a camp, the arrangement of rooms in such a house went in a circle. The Mongols called kuren a nomadic camp surrounded by carts. The detachment that defended this fortified camp was also called kuren. The word was used in this meaning among the Cossacks. The Cossacks and Kubans called a regiment a kuren.

Don historians, who dealt with the problem of the origin of the kuren, came to the conclusion that the kuren, based on the type of construction, was of Novgorod origin; its usual yellow color was established, probably in continuity with the Novgorodians.

You can often hear statements from celebrities about the beauty of Cossack villages, the basis of which are Cossack houses - kurens.

Here, for example, is what F. Kryukov said about Starocherkassk: “Close to the cathedral, it resembles to some extent a city: the houses are stone, two-story, quite beautiful. ...But the further I went from the cathedral, the more Starocherkassk turned into the most ordinary grassroots village: houses painted yellow on high wooden foundations, or with “bottoms”, i.e. with a lower mezzanine, with wooden galleries (“balusters”) all around, closely clung to each other, the dense greenery of small gardens looked out onto the street through the picturesque ruins of the wattle fence...”

Traveling along the Don, F. Kryukov did not ignore other villages. “...We were approaching the village of Razdorskaya. The view is unusual, small houses covered with planks, iron, reeds, irregularly scattered along the mountainous coast, yellow with white shutters and white with yellow...”

And here’s how V. Voronov spoke about the Don kurens: “...In the front gardens, among the greenery and flowers, there are blue outlandish carvings of the platbands, real Russian lace, just like in Vladimir or Yaroslavl villages...”

Construction of a smoking area

Before considering the architectural features and interior decoration of the smoking area, it is advisable to familiarize yourself with the stages of its construction.

The construction of the kuren began with laying the foundation, the main component of which was shell rock or sandstone. Also an indispensable element was the building clay that held them together. The foundation gradually turned into the walls of the first floor, that is, the lower levels. The second floor was wooden. The upper part of the house was cut from the local forest: oak, poplar, alder, but log walls were extremely rare: usually the trunk was hewn on four sides and even sawed into thick plates; the cracks were filled with clay, coated with clay on the outside and whitewashed.

A type of “round house” has appeared, with three or four windows facing the street, one wall is often simply blank. Certainly a feature of a Cossack kuren is a balcony and a “galdarey”, i.e. boarded-up outdoor corridor. The Cossacks call the balcony that encircles the entire house a balyasnik. It is no coincidence that women who gossiped on such a balcony were said to be “sharpening their hair.” It served to make it convenient to open and close the shutters. And also in order to make it convenient for guests to watch family holidays (weddings, farewells) through the windows and then carry on a conversation (gossip) about the hospitality of the hosts. A covered porch - a locker - leads from the baluster to the gallery, where an external staircase led with a front carved porch with a canopy at the top.

In the second half of the 19th century, carved ornaments with a very complex geometric pattern appeared on the cornices, pediments, porch posts and other details, the basis of which was a motif characteristic of the Don Cossack applied art - a grape mustache, a vine.

The carving covered a wide board that was nailed to the façade under the eaves of the roof. In large villages, already at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries, they began to build a balcony and a porch with carved posts instead of a locker. The windows were divided into two equal parts: the upper - fixed and the lower - movable, which rose upward along the grooves and was secured in the desired position with a stick. If you look at the Cossack kuren, you can see a lot of windows, which make the Cossack kuren different from Great Russian and Little Russian dwellings. It should be noted that the windows were located not only on the second floor, but also on the first, depending on the type of smoking area. If the first floor was supposed to be non-residential, then there were windows only on the second floor, and the role of the windows at the bottom was played by small holes that created a draft necessary for storing food. The total number of windows in the kuren can reach from 10 to 20. From the outside, the windows were closed with single-leaf hanging shutters, which are also characterized by subtle decorated compositions. The windows are usually decorated with carved frames. Various figurines were cut out of wood, which not only decorated them, but also served as a talisman (since the Cossacks were superstitious): they were supposed to protect unkind people from evil forces, spells and witchcraft. The decor of Cossack kurens, however, does not differ in particularly intricate carvings; Cossacks are not carpenters, and hired carpenters had no time to do delicate work.

The roof of the kuren was hipped and not steep - about thirty degrees. The roof was covered with reeds, chakan, straw, and later with iron. To prevent fire, a sheaf of rye straw aligned “under a comb” or “under a brush” was dipped into a clay solution before being laid on the roof. “Under the comb” they covered with reeds. And this method is still alive today. “Curved like a spring, with a large scratcher on the convex side. In the reed sheaf he combed, the reeds lay even, like strings, wings from bottom to top, letting the top row overlap the bottom row by a third, sometimes tying the sheaves and always tightening them with poles. Such a string roof with thousands of reed holes, loved by the wind and bees, gave the house a unique look. Four slopes fell onto the slot, like fingers through fingers, smartly.

So, the house is ready. The finished house was painted. Small pegs were driven into the walls: into cracks and cracks so that the coating would stick better. Later, a wedge appeared, a lattice - stuffed - criss-crossed rods, and then shingles. For coating, clay was mixed with manure, but without straw; Horse manure was preferred - dry, crumbly. The whole house was smeared at once, so many women were invited.

The house, smeared, usually stood for a day. Then two or three women lubricated, rubbed the cracks, smoothed out the unevenness.

Later, the good housewife had a house like candy. She herself “mazikali” it every year with liquid clay. Over time, the coating acquired a stone fortress.

The attic (floor) did not have windows. We went up there via a large staircase from the hallway. The staircase ended at a window in the ceiling, closed by a door. Throwing the door up and to the side opened the way to the light. It was quite enough so as not to confuse the golden necklace of onions with a zinc, panuchy bunch of dried bream. Everything in the attic was distributed relative to the chimney and pipe, the pillar. A horizontal chimney (lezhen) and a pipe, smelling dryly of brick and clay coating, crowned a two-level heating system.

After the house was “anointed”, it was painted. The ancient Cossack soul took on three colors: blue, blue, yellow.

Blue and chalk produced blue and blue colors. Yellow clay – yellow.

The wooden walls inside and wooden floors – “bridges” – were also yellowed with clay. Originally, the wood floors were not painted. The owner “bathed” them with sand, with bricks, and then rubbed them with clay. Once dried, they glowed with a warm sunny yellow. The wooden walls of frame and adobe buildings were painted white, and the shutters yellow. Often shutters and cornices were made blue.

All these colors were in harmony with the multi-colored steppe grasses, yellow heads of sunflowers, white clouds in the wide open expanse of the blue Don sky.

So, from the point of view of architectural construction, the smoking area is ready. But before moving on to studying the interior decoration, let's look at several types of smoking areas. The division of which is related to their architectural features.

Architect S.I. Kulikov, exploring the people's housing of the Don, showed how the development of housing gradually progressed from a dugout with adobe floors, consisting of one warm room - a hut, and a cold entryway - a vat - to multi-room residential buildings.

First, they built kurens, consisting of two rooms - a hallway and an upper room - separated from each other by a stove. Such a house was called “five-walled” because, in addition to four external walls, it had an internal one that separated the rooms. Such a house was adjoined by a vestibule, a closet and a gallery.

With the division of the first room into two - the hallway and the cooking room - a three-room kuren, or round house, arose, which became the most widespread. The canopy was used as a storage room. In the hallway there was a trestle bed and a stool with a bucket of water, and a towel perch hung above the trestle bed. These types of kurens were identified by S.I. Kulikov, and researchers of Don folk architecture identify up to 5 or more types of kurens.

1st type: two-story building with 2 or 4 porches, with a bypass gallery at the level of the 2nd floor. The house had a cornice extension of up to 1 meter, traditional decor on wooden structures in 3-6 rows, porches with decorated “umbrellas”, carved posts and balusters along the flights of stairs and gallery.

Type 2: one and a half story building. The first floor is ground floor with utility rooms. A walk-around gallery on the top floor level with a deep veranda on the southern facade, 2 or 3 porches, one of them a front porch, without a flight of stairs to the ground. Facades with different plastic solutions.

3rd type: similar to the previous one. But there is a finishing entrance in the ground floor, a bypass gallery and a veranda on two facades, on the south and west sides.

4th type: one-story building on a high base. The kuren had a narrow bypass at the floor level of the residential floor; there were options without railings. A front ring without a half-march down on the street facade and a utility porch with a half-march into the courtyard.

5th type: a one-story building on a high base without a bypass gallery with a deep corner veranda, onto which a door and 2-3 windows opened. The veranda had a front porch with an “umbrella” and a half-march to the ground level, oriented to the street.

Interior of the smoking room

The first floor of the smoking area is traditionally called the lower floor. In the center of the bottom is a room with no windows, but with small holes in the wall. The Don Cossacks called this room “cold”. Construction techniques developed over centuries made it possible to build a “cold” room in such a way that a draft constantly blew in it, cooling down in the chambers surrounding this room. In the old days, in the cold, one could easily observe the following picture: bunches of herbs, mountains of apples, watermelons, grapes hanging on threads in a draft smell sweet; the whole family gathers, spreading a felt felt on the cool clay floor, drinks the “brew” or eats icy sizzling salted watermelons at noon, in the very heat, when the sizzling sun floats over the steppe in a dusty haze of heat.

The closets, with a narrow corridor, border the cold room around the perimeter with the help of windows - openings. Once upon a time, weapons were stored in niches here. A narrow single door (necessarily opening inward, so that it could be easily supported with a log or stone) led to the first, recessed floor. It was possible to enter here only one at a time, bending under the low ceiling, and immediately plummet down two steps - my home is my fortress.

And in the old days it was possible to fall even lower: right in front of the door they built a “hunter’s cellar” - a pit with a stake in the middle, closed in normal times with a wooden shield. An enemy who burst into the kuren immediately ended up there. In general, strangers did not go to this part of the smoking area. Guests usually climbed wide steps (“thresholds”) to the second floor and found themselves on “balusters” - a balcony-gallery, terrace. From the terrace, passing along a narrow corridor, we find ourselves in the main room (hall), which was always ready to receive guests. In the front corner of this room (left opposite the entrance) there was a shrine (a shelf or icon case, i.e. a glazed frame, a cabinet for icons), which had several icons in rich silver frames (a thin metal coating on the icon, leaving only the image of faces and hands open ). In front of the shrine hung a lit lamp (a small vessel with a wick, filled with wooden oil and lit in front of the icon, in front of the shrine).

Along the shrine and between the icons themselves hung dried herbs and various decorations made of colored paper and ears of corn in small bunches. Here in the corner, under the holy image (icon), there was a table, always covered with a clean tablecloth. There were benches along the walls. In the houses of wealthy Cossacks, several more chairs were placed against one of the walls, either from ordinary wood, or carved with high backs from valuable wood species.

All the walls of the hall were hung with weapons and harness. Guns, sabers (checkers), daggers, belts with silver buckles, morocco bullet bags. The wealth of the ceremonial harness depended on the wealth of the owner of the house.

In this room there was a supplier (postav) - a cabinet for placing dishes with glass doors, through which the “guest” dishes arranged in order were clearly visible. There was always a table in the center of the hall. Covered with a tablecloth and always ready to receive guests. At the front wall, in one partition there was a flower, and in the other there was a mirror, and on the floor stood a hidden chest, bound in iron. In the right corner there was a bed covered with a flannelette or a blanket made from scraps. There were two fluffed down pillows at each end of the bed. Chintz curtains were hung on the windows above the bed. In the summer, the same curtains were used to cover the stove and doorways. The hiding chest was covered with a patchwork bedding. The room was decorated with drawings, engravings depicting battles, parades, sieges of fortresses, as well as family photographs in carved wooden frames or portraits of the royal family, Cossack chieftains. There were potted flowers on the windowsills and stools. Cossack women were especially fond of geraniums and oleanders, tubs of which were displayed on the balcony.

From the hall a door led to the bedroom, where there was a large bed with a mountain of feather beds and pillows from the hostess's dowry. The Cossacks called this room home. A cradle for the baby hung near the bed; he stayed in it until 4-6 months, and then it was replaced with a swinging cradle forged from iron.

In the right corner of the bedroom there should be a chest, which, like the hiding chest, is covered with a patchwork bedding. The mistress of the house kept her dowry, clothes, and jewelry in such a chest.

On long winter evenings, the housewife would spin yarn, so a spinning wheel is an integral part of the bedroom. The walls of the bedroom, like the walls of the hall, were decorated with photographs, weapons, and there were also flowers on the windows.

With any number of rooms, there was always a separate kitchen, or cooking room, where food was prepared and eaten. In the kitchen, in addition to the bread oven, there was a stove for cooking and shelves with household utensils. Pots and cast iron pots, bowls, wooden spoons, buckets, cauldrons and copper water cubes were placed on the shelves and in supply cabinets. To prepare and store food, they also used earthenware, which was also located on the shelves of the cabinets. Clay vessels had various shapes and, accordingly, names: pods (narrow-necked vessels with widely swollen sides), makhotkas - low jugs with a wide neck without handles, in Russian - “krynka”, makitras - large wide pots, jugs - vertically elongated barrel-shaped vessels with narrowed neck with a handle, spout, sometimes with a lid, etc. To give the products an elegant look, they were covered with “glaze”: green, blue, brown (glaze made of lead mica and tin ash).

The Don kurens were distinguished by their cleanliness and elegance. Leaving the kitchen, we again find ourselves in a corridor-gallery. Here is proof of the origin of the word “kuren”, that is, the arrangement of rooms in a circle, from where we entered, we returned there.

In the corridor-gallery, the hostess kept a collection of medicinal herbs; closer to the exit there was a chest on which there were buckets of water; above them hung a rocker, with the help of which Cossack women carried water. There could be benches and chairs along the walls.

This is how the Cossacks lived in their kurens in cleanliness and comfort.

Furniture of a wealthy Cossack house

The interior of one of the rooms of the kuren, which belonged to a wealthy Cossack, is offered to the attention of museum visitors. Not every village resident could afford the furniture in it, but only those who had the means to afford it. The presented exhibition did not aim to recreate the interior of a rich house. Here are individual items from the furnishings of the “state rooms”. Those Cossacks who, due to the nature of their service, visited “Europe”, received an idea of ​​​​the “beautiful” architecture and the rich decoration of the house and could afford to order a “beautiful” house and furniture.

There were few such people in the village of Razdorskaya. Only a few of these houses have survived on the main street. This is the house of the merchant Cossack G.M. Ustinov, the house of the Terpugovs, which is currently undergoing major repairs.

A wealthy village resident could bring the furniture he liked from abroad. In front of you are mirrors, among which, quite possibly, there are “overseas” beauties. Carving was used in the manufacture of mirror frames. One can note how much imagination and love the craftsmen put into making these magnificent products! Each of them not only served to reflect the beauty of the mistress of the house, it decorated the house itself. Mirrors were widely distributed. They were in almost every home.

Mirrors in richly decorated frames are associated with the Baroque period: complex profiles of cornices; at the same time, there are styles of ornaments from other eras - Romanesque (geometric ornament) and Gothic (deciduous).

The wardrobe was also quite widespread in the village.

When a girl was given in marriage, a dowry was given “for her.” In poorer families it was a chest, and in richer families it was a wardrobe.

It was not only inconvenient and expensive to bring bulky furniture from abroad, it was simply not necessary. In the village of Razdorskaya lived a local craftsman - cabinetmaker Vasily Petrovich Samoilenko. The sideboards and chest of drawers presented at the exhibition were made here in the 20s of the last century.

A chest of drawers, practically devoid of decor, can be classified as so-called “carpentry furniture”. Such furniture has clear outlines without imitating architectural forms.

Buffet decors, on the contrary, are overloaded with elements belonging to a variety of furniture styles. The tympanum and pilasters represent the “Renaissance”, the acroterions are “Gothic”, the panels are “Baroque”, the geometric ornament of the friezes is “Romanesque”.

The chair with a high back is made in the traditions of classicism with its strict forms.

The chair with a curved back belongs to the “Viennese” category.

Wardrobe – paneled doors (frame-and-panel knitting has been used since late Gothic), a lost tympanum from the Renaissance, decorative half-columns (belonging to classicism).

The watch is clearly imported. The thing in the village is quite rare, accessible to a select few.

All of the exhibits listed above are presented in the exhibition and the visitor becomes clear that although we see furniture of different styles, it does not lose its charm and creates the impression of grace and beauty.

Cossack yard

Cossack estates - courtyards with barns and sheds, stockyards-bases were kept clean and tidy.

“Every Cossack is a sovereign with his own court,” says the proverb. If from a legal point of view this was indeed the case, and even the ataman could not enter the Cossack’s courtyard without his permission, there were still regulations that were strictly followed by all “citizens of the stanitsa state.”

The first such requirement-custom was: a separate building for each service. That is, the stable itself is the most expensive building on the estate (sometimes more expensive than the smoking area), usually made of stone, brick, adobe or wood; separately - cowshed, chicken coop, pigsty, sheds, barns.

The second requirement was the presence of several courtyards: in front of the kuren there is a base (Turkic sandy), behind the kuren there is lavada, and the kuren itself has a porch on the street, windows on the field, just like the Cossacks went to bed by the fire - facing towards the enemy. In the back, next to the kuren, vegetables were grown, in almost every yard there were vineyards, the remaining space was usually occupied by potatoes. The area occupied by the Cossack's courtyard was very small. The houses were located very compactly, the distance between neighboring houses, especially in the center of the village, was several meters. The fact is that in the old days and now the stanitsa lands - the share of the Cossacks - were located beyond the Don. In the village itself, vegetable gardens, as they are now called, were the base, and fruits and grapes were grown in so-called gardens, which were located on the slopes of mounds (hills). This is how the Cossacks used the land economically and rationally. In order to keep the house warm in winter, it was necessary to stock up on coal and firewood. The firewood storage is behind the house and the coal shed is next to the house. A place to relax is usually a bench in front of the smoking area, near the fence, or a wicker arbor between the house and the summer kitchen.

Special mention should be made about summer kitchens (letnitsa). Letnitsa is a purely Cossack construction, and, I must say, a reasonable one. Food was prepared in the summer house from spring until late autumn, and the family often ate here, which freed the house from the crowd of kitchen utensils. But the construction of the summerhouse provided not only convenience in cooking, but also protected the smoking area from fire.

Old villages burned very often. This was due to the fact that the entire building was wooden, and the houses were located at arm's length. Therefore, as soon as one house caught fire, the resulting fire burned out an entire street, and sometimes the entire settlement. The Cossacks took extreme precautions: during the summer, all stoves in their houses were sealed, and cooking could only be done in dugouts or summer houses. Those responsible for the fire were evicted from the village.

Often next to the summer kitchen you can see a small primitive stove-horn (horn) made of brick under a small canopy. For convenience, a table and benches were placed near the stove, where the family dined in the summer.

An equally important building was the “crane” well - the name is directly related to the crane bird, because the appearance of the well resembles this bird standing on one leg and drinking water. Well diggers were especially respected by the Cossacks. This work was associated with incredibly hard work and mortal danger, so wells were often dug “on a vow” - by people “atonement for sin.”

While digging a well, the digger did not touch either wine or money; some took a vow of silence. The villagers pooled their money by hiring musicians who played constantly while the work was going on. Sometimes the well worker demanded that the Psalter be read continuously while working.

What was he thinking about, making his way through the chalk and sandy layers, sometimes to a depth of 40 meters, and weaving elm branches around the walls around him? What did you remember? Who did you pray for? The appearance of water in the well meant that the vow was fulfilled and God forgave the sin of the one who made the vow. But the water could be salty or bitter. Therefore, each steppe well was a carefully preserved miracle.

The wells were crowned with the inscriptions: “Good people, having drunk some water and Cossacks, take pity on the poor, forgive their sins and remember them in prayers,” “This well was dug by vow of the Don Cossack, the servant of God Stepan, in memory of his mother, the servant of God, Agrafena. Its waters are pure, like a mother’s love, and endless, like the tears my mother shed for me.”

Closer than a hundred fathoms from the well, it was forbidden to water horses and drive away cattle; the road could be built only 300 fathoms from the well.

All Cossack farmsteads are fenced with fences called “Pletni” - from the word to weave. Very often, the Cossacks themselves wove these fences in order to avoid harming animals. They were woven from vines that were harvested in early spring. The fences could be made of stone - shell rock, sandstone.

Source – Razdor Museum

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Dwellings of the Don Cossacks - MicroArticles

From the history of the formation of villages on the Don

Gone are the days of abusive alarms and campaigns, traces of ancient Cossack towns have disappeared in the reed thickets. Once upon a time, small fortifications began to grow into vast settlements - villages.

The word "stanitsa", which has long existed on the Don in many meanings, from the end of the 18th century was used only in the meaning of "village".

Initially, the word “stanitsa” did not mean a populated area. It was a tribal or comradely association of families, clans or even tribes. There were “winter” and “passenger” villages, which were sent to the Tsar with diplomatic missions. There were atamans and ambassadors with guards in such villages. These were fighting or hunting detachments. Sometimes they were also called villages.

The villages roamed under the protection of the town, and in case of danger they either hid behind the walls of the town or migrated further away. The village belonged to a territory called a yurt.

Gradually the towns were absorbed into the villages.

The villages adopted the entire internal structure from the towns: the central square is the Maidan, in its eastern part there is a church or cathedral, opposite across the square is the Ataman Board. The square was surrounded by forges, armories, barns, grain dumps... Next to the Maidan there were always hitching posts where horses were parked.

Over time, the military purpose of the Maidan was replaced by a trade one, and in the wide space between the church and the administration the famous fairs began to rustle, and gymnasiums, shops and even a theater appeared around it...

From the history of the Cossack estate

One of the proverbs says: “Every Cossack is a sovereign in his own court.” Even the ataman could not enter the Cossack's yard without the owner's permission.

There were instructions that had to be strictly followed by all “citizens of the village society”.

The type of home depended on the wealth of its owner. And by the middle of the 18th century, the Cossacks were no longer homogeneous in social composition: they split into two unequal groups - the homely, wealthy Cossacks, and the poor, poor ones.

Regardless of class, the Cossack dwelling combined both a habitat and a defensive structure.

The name "kuren" is Mongolian. The word “smoking,” that is, blowing light smoke, to which the name of the Cossack dwelling is sometimes attributed, has nothing to do with it. The word “kuren” means “round”, even more broadly – ​​“harmonious”.

The design of the traditional Cossack dwelling, which the Cossacks call a kuren, was influenced by the river culture of the Lower Don and Ciscaucasia.

The first settlements arose in the floodplains - river reed thickets, where you can’t dig a dugout - the water is close. Therefore, the dwellings were made of turkish ones. The walls were woven from two rows of twigs or reeds, and the space between them was filled with earth. The roof was made of reeds, with a hole for smoke to escape.

On the Don, wide river floods of many kilometers often occurred, so they began to build pile houses - chiganaks. People of the “Chig” tribe lived in them.

In a modern Cossack house it is easy to guess the features of a pile construction. The Cossack kuren is two-story. These are most likely memories of stilts. In Starocherkassk, quite recently, in spring and autumn, during the flood of the Don, Cossacks went to visit each other on boats.

The first floor of the kuren was made of brick, and the second was built of wood. The first floor, as a rule, was for utility purposes. It was believed that “you need to live in a tree, and store supplies in a stone.”

In the center of the first floor there is a windowless room, which the Don Cossacks call “cold”; a slight draft was constantly blowing in it. At noon, in the heat of the day, the whole family gathered in this room, drinking “uzvar” or eating ice-cold sizzling salted watermelons.

A cold chamber is bordered along the perimeter by a narrow corridor. Weapons were once stored here. A narrow single door led to the first, recessed floor, where you could only enter one at a time, bending under the low ceiling, and immediately fall two steps down - my home is my fortress. And in the old days it was possible to crash even lower: right in front of the door they built a “hunter’s cellar” - a pit with a stake in the middle, closed in normal times with a wooden shield. An enemy who burst into the kuren immediately ended up there. Strangers did not go into this part of the smoking area.

Guests usually climbed wide steps to the second floor and found themselves on the “balusters” - a balcony-gallery, a terrace that sometimes surrounded the entire house.

The kuren was clearly divided into left, female, and right, male. Half. Directly behind the entrance was the largest room, the hall where guests were received. There was the best furniture and the best dishes here.

In the small hut, the main core around which the rooms were located was the rude stove. To the right of it was the kunatskaya, where the unmarried sons of the owner, the head of the family, lived in barracks-like simplicity. To the left are the girls', children's and cooking rooms. The left side was warmer.

In the large kuren of a rich Cossack, all the rooms were strictly separated. Women and small children never entered the kunatskaya: there were weapons there. Children did not enter their parents' room without permission.

The roofs of the kuren were reeds or straw. Such a roof could last up to forty years, but there was one problem - it burned like gunpowder. The Cossacks began to cover their houses with iron. Cossack women adapted to use such a roof for drying fruits.

For each service there is a separate building, that is, a separate stable - the most expensive building on the estate. As a rule, the stable was built of brick. Separately - a chicken coop, a cowshed, a pigsty and other outbuildings.

The estate consisted of several courtyards: in front of the kuren there was a base, behind the kuren there was a levada, and the kuren itself had a porch on the street and the windows overlooked the field. There are vegetable gardens in the back. Vineyards, orchards and melon fields in the villages were located in specially designated areas, cut-off allotments, which were either common - farmsteads, or privately owned. Land was allocated for melons and distributed in shares annually.

This placement of the estate was explained by the relative abundance of land and the fear of fire.

With the arrival of spring, they stopped cooking in the kurens and moved to the summer kitchen - cooking.

People did not sleep on the stove in the summer kitchen; it was not used for heating. They drowned it with brushwood, straw, corn husks or dung.

The dung produced a special ash that retained its heat for a long time.

The Cossack kitchen was distinguished by its sterile cleanliness. The stove was whitened after each cooking. Above the stove vent, the hub, which was closed by a black iron damper, there was always a piece of mirror smeared: the cook could look to see if it was smeared with soot.

Next to the stove is a table so that the food is “piping hot.” A few steps from the cooking area is a cellar where meat and dairy products were stored in the cold and on ice. Bundles of onions, peppers, and dried fish hung above the summer cooking area under a canopy.

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“Cossack Don” cultural and historical tourist complex in the village. Starocherkasskaya

This is another piece of the cultural heritage of the village of Starocherkasskaya. Here you can get acquainted with Cossack architecture, customs and way of life, history and folklore, national cuisine and Cossack crafts. By reviving the Orthodox traditions of the Don Cossacks, we are reviving Russia!

Concept

The cultural and historical tourist complex “Cossack Don” is a unique project that allows everyone to get acquainted with the life and history of the Don Cossacks. The idea of ​​​​creating the “Cossack Don” complex received the blessing of the Orthodox Church in 2004 in the person of Archbishop of Rostov and Novocherkassk Panteleimon (currently Metropolitan of Rostov and Yaroslavl), which defined the principles for the development of the project as “culture, traditions and spiritual revival.”

The concept of “Cossack Don” is based on a harmonious combination of the stated principles and active recreation. As an ethnographic complex, “Cossack Don” revives the original Don traditions in the spirit of Orthodoxy. The central place is occupied by the Holy Protection Church-chapel in memory of the Cossacks who rested in a foreign land. Projects for the development and reconstruction of historical buildings were developed by the Patriarchal Architectural and Restoration Center of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra in the traditions of Cossack architecture of the 18th century.

The educational idea of ​​the project is to answer the question: “Who is a Cossack?” The Pokrovsky courtyard with a museum exhibition is a key link in understanding the “spiritual image of the Cossack”. Various social projects, such as the Pokrovsky Expeditions, continue the traditions of Cossack education and raising children, and also create conditions for the development of scientific research in the field of the history of Cossacks abroad.

The complex is becoming one of the most promising ethnographic projects on the Don, where there is everything for cultural, family and sports recreation, which today attracts many urban residents. The implementation of the commercial part makes it possible to develop the tourism industry and create conditions for comfortable rest and leisure for residents and guests of the South of Russia.

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Cossack housing – Cossack village

Cossack dwelling.

The peculiarities of the emergence and development of Cossack settlements are closely related to the development of new lands, and, at a later date, to the colonization of the North Caucasus. For settlements, the Cossacks chose strategically advantageous places: steep river banks, hills protected by ravines and swamps. The villages were surrounded by a deep ditch and an earthen rampart. There were frequent cases of changes in the original location.

Taking this into account, it can be assumed that initially the Cossacks preferred easily disassembled structures that could be easily dismantled. Thus, the historical name of the village of Veshenskaya - Vezhki - comes from the ancient common Slavic word “vezha”, which meant a simple conical hut. In particular, in the forest-steppe and steppe zones of Eastern Europe in pre-Mongol times, the Eastern Slavs called semi-nomadic prefabricated or transportable felt dwellings, later known in Russian under the terms “wagon” or “yurt”, vezha.

Apparently, the name of the village Vezhki came from such vezhs, which indicates the type of dwellings in it. It should be noted that among the Khoper Cossacks in the poorest Cossack estates, by the 18th century. residential semi-dugouts called “shish” have been preserved in the form of conical huts with fireplaces.

The huts were quite consistent with the Cossacks’ camping lifestyle and warm climate. Cossack dwellings were built using local building materials: wood, clay mixed with straw, and reeds.

In the XVIII – XIX centuries. Due to the sharp increase in the number of settlements, it was then that border defense lines were created and changes occurred in the organization of settlements. These settlements were usually called villages; apparently, the name comes from the word “stan”, which means “in Rus' in the 11th – 17th centuries. meant the name of a military camp, which was usually set up on an elevated place and fortified with wagons ... ", a fence, sometimes a ditch or an earthen rampart.

As a rule, villages were placed in secluded places, often along rivers and streams, and were well adapted to protection from attacks. In the XVIII – XIX centuries. When laying out any village, its boundaries were cut with a plow, a ditch was dug around the intended boundaries, filled with water, an earthen rampart was poured, along the perimeter of which thorny thorns were planted, thereby creating additional protection. Gates were installed on the southern and northern sides (less often on four), guarded around the clock and closed at sunset. The Cossacks tried to return home and herd the cattle before dark.

Usually the villages were built up compactly, the streets were straight, and huts were built on them in two rows. A characteristic feature of each Cossack village was the church, which was always located on an elevated place. Nearby are administrative buildings, entertainment clubs, schools and gymnasiums, market stalls and shopping shops. In the center of the village there was the Cathedral or central square. Around each village there was a land yurt with forests and hayfields, pastures for livestock and arable lands.

At the same time, a new type of dwelling became widespread - kuren (in the Voika Donskoy Region). Cossack kuren is a ground-based timber frame (less often stone) two-chamber building. (The word “kuren” is of Turkic-Mongolian origin, the same as the Russian “stan”).

In this regard, a very indicative device was preserved in some Cossack estates in the Khoper and neighboring Don villages until the present century - a specific heating system in residential premises with heating smoke ducts under the floor or under benches called “underground”. The “underground” stove, “dungeon”, made of mud brick (2 x 1 x 0.5 m) with “beds” was connected to the Russian stove. Russians do not have similar types of stoves. This system is more similar to the kan, known among the Mongols, Jurchens, Bohais, and Khitans. In addition, it resembles the Golden Horde U-shaped sufa.

Type of housing by the 19th century. consists of an interweaving of light forms traditional for the Cossacks and borrowings from their neighbors (both Russian and other ethnic populations). A hut (in some regions - a hut) with a closet appears. In the 60-70s. XIX century In the Ust-Medveditsky and Khopersky districts of the Don Army, five-walled walls appeared. In lower areas there are two-story buildings. Apparently, this was due to the general lack of space and constant river floods. The financial situation of the Cossacks also played an important role.

Some Cossacks, as temporary housing, built themselves dugout huts, deepened into the ground, with so-called “blind-sighted windows”, which had a gable roof, covered with turf, with a slight slope. However, the overwhelming majority of the Don grassroots Cossacks already at the beginning of the 19th century. built large multi-room houses. By this period, developed forms of housing construction took place on the territory of the Cossack troops in the south of Russia. Log dwellings, characteristic of many regions of Russia, have not become widespread in these places.

In the 20th century the type of Cossack dwelling is changing under the influence of general integrating trends caused by the development of capitalist, commodity-money relations, the influence of the urban lifestyle and the instructions of the military authorities.

When laying houses, the Cossacks had their own special signs and customs: grain was poured onto the place intended for construction at night; if the grain was there in the morning, it was believed that the place for construction was good and everything would “go to hand.” The place where cattle rested was also considered lucky for the construction of a dwelling. To prevent dampness in the house, black lamb's wool was placed under the matka, the main supporting beam in the hut. When laying the foundation for housing, the Cossacks tried to be sure to serve a prayer service.

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Cossack house - EASTERN OUTskirts

Cossack, this is conditional. There are no Cossack houses or anything special at all - Cossack, at least here in Transbaikalia. All these Cossack traditions that the “Cossacks” are reviving are all pure fiction, and the current Trans-Bakalian “Cossacks” themselves are a funny phantasmagoria. Next is a description of a pre-revolutionary house, in which the Transbaikal Cossacks of the Turin village of the Kaidalovskaya village once actually lived. In which I also had the opportunity to live, and for more than one year

The house (hut) has four walls, with a terrace at least a meter high. The roof is covered with planks, slopes to the east and west. The house has eight windows, three of them face the south side, overlooking a small front garden and the street, only one window on the north side, two windows on the other two sides, and on the east side both windows overlook the terrace. Some of the windows are double-hung. At night and in hot weather, the windows were closed with shutters. At night, the shutters were locked with a bolt, which was a metal plate and the same stick or pin, the end of which was pushed into the room through a special hole and secured there with a metal pin.

Entrance to the house is on the east side from the terrace through the entryway. The canopy and storage room are attached to the house, made of timber, both named rooms have one window, although the windows are too conventional, in fact there are two small, unglazed loopholes closer to the ceiling. The door in the canopy is made of thick boards, and is closed from the inside with a large wooden bolt, which is a long beam with a notch at the ends; when closed, the bolt is placed (inserted) into two forged brackets driven into the door blocks. The door to the house is low, when entering you have to duck your head and step over the high threshold.

Right next to the entrance is the kitchen, the entire length of the house, the ceilings are quite high. In the far right corner there used to be icons, but there are traces of fastening and a shelf. On the left is a Russian stove, not in the center of the hut, but closer to the far wall from the entrance. From the stove to the front door there is a wooden partition (solid in height), in which there is a double-leaf (panel) door. To the left of the front door is a washbasin (for winter, outside in summer). To the right of the entrance, on the same wall in which the front door, hooks for outerwear, approximately at the level of an adult’s head, cut out of wood, were inserted either directly into the wall into pre-drilled holes or into a separate board (there were both options). There is a separate hook, possibly for a checker, to the right and higher than the others, although there was also a similar hook on the right wall. All these hooks at least look like the teeth of a wooden harrow, but it is clear that they were made specifically for clothing.

Next are the hangers - a corner in which calves were periodically kept in cold weather, and other living creatures, as a reminder of this there were round iron brackets driven into the wall above the floor and traces of the fence being attached, and the floor itself bears signs of damage from corrosion...

In general, the field should be mentioned separately, it was not even made of boards, but of wide, thick blocks, along the entire length of the hut, from walking along it, scraping when washing, the softer wood was worn out, but the stronger knots were better preserved and from this the floor looks wavy. But this is only in the kitchen; in the other part of the hut the floor is quite flat.

The other part of the hut is two more rooms, formed by two wooden partitions running from the sides of the stove, in each of the partitions there are double doors. One of the rooms is large - a hall (room) with four windows on two sides, in the center a round bracket is driven into the ceiling beam, the other room is small, I don’t know what it was used for before, I had a bedroom, the entrance to it was like kitchen, so from the large room through the doors. The passage from the kitchen to the bedroom was closed with a curtain; in principle, the fourth wall of this little room was formed by the back of the stove.

Of course, I don’t know what was in the hut in the old days - I’m not that ancient. So we can only guess. However, even the grandmother of a Soviet rural teacher, in the 60-70s, the interior of her home included three chests: her great-grandfather’s Cossack chest, her great-grandmother’s, all chained, for a dowry, and the grandmother’s actual chest for the same thing, but simpler.

I will write about the oven and underground separately, since these are quite complex and multifunctional structures. The yard and outbuildings are also a whole system that must be described separately.

I haven’t forgotten about the shelf for runaway convicts; there wasn’t one like that, because in the village, in addition to the Cossacks, there was a convoy team.

albert-motsar.livejournal.com

Kuren - Cossack house - Terek Cossack

In the 19th century, kurens were built from logs, less often stone, square houses with a hipped roof.

In the villages along the middle and lower reaches of the Don, kurens with underground and residential “bottoms” (the lower floor or mezzanine, usually stone or brick) predominated. The further south the village, the higher the “lower classes” were.

Kuren has a specific layout: traditionally the stove was located in the center of the main living space, and not in the corner, as in the dwellings of Russian peasants. In the 19th century, they changed the position of the stove or moved it to the “bottoms”; they began to use Swiss, Dutch, and rough stoves instead of the Russian stove. The stove in the Lower Don kuren usually had no stove bench.

In the kuren, separate rooms, from three to five, were separated by partitions (cooking room, kitchen, bedroom, living room, hallway). Often the rooms were walk-through and connected in a circle. The lower level was divided into two or three unequal rooms. Sometimes a kitchen was installed in the residential “lower areas.” Often the “bottoms” were used as a storage room. The entrance to the “lower classes” was from the yard. The residential “bottoms” had windows, and the non-residential ones had small holes in the walls. A house with a non-residential room on the ground floor was called an outbuilding.

Kureni with “bottoms” or on an amshannik (high foundation) had balusters - galleries around the entire house, or on two or three sides of the house, through which one could close the window shutters. There were windows on all the walls. There were also galdarei - balconies or verandas, to which boats could moor during a flood.

During large floods, wrote V.D. Sukhorukov about Cherkassk, the whole place is covered with water; Nowadays, residents travel to each other in boats, and for pedestrians narrow platforms are made of boards, drawn from one porch to another or located on the water in the form of smooth bridges... Foreign travelers who visited Cherkassk say that the city can be similar with Venice, if only they had diligently taken up its arrangement.

The outer walls of the kurens were painted in bright colors. The kuren was decorated with carvings. Cossack houses were kept clean.

The yard was fenced with wattle fence, stones or a picket fence; In the old days there were no high fences in the villages. There were outbuildings in the yard. In the 19th century, houses in the villages stood in disarray, the streets were not orderly.

terskiykazak.livejournal.com

Cossack kuren: house and fortress

The word “kuren” means a Cossack dwelling, house. It comes from the Chagatai language, where kuran is “crowd”, “tribe”, “troop of warriors” and (unexpectedly!) “bakery”.
It is interesting that in Odessa, kurens are flimsy buildings near the sea, built from scrap materials. Among the Cossacks, a village of 100 houses was called a kuren. At the same time, the kuren was also a unit of administrative division in the Zaporozhye Sich: several Cossack villages made up a kuren with a kuren ataman at its head.

Historically, the “kuren” was both a habitat and a defensive structure. The structure of an ordinary Cossack dwelling, called a kuren, was influenced by the river culture of the Lower Don and Ciscaucasia. The first Cossack settlements arose in floodplains (river reed thickets), the dwellings had turluch walls (that is, woven from two rows of rods or reeds and filled with earth for warmth and strength space between them), a reed roof with a hole for smoke to escape. However, wide, many-kilometer river floods required special buildings - piles, which influenced the further development of building construction.
The features of a pile construction are easily assumed in a modern Cossack dwelling. The Cossack kuren is two-story in structure. And, most likely, its second tier is not a “basement” that has grown to the second floor, but a memory of the stilts on which dwellings once stood. The Cossack kuren comes, as a rule, of two types: the type of South Russian (Ukrainian) hut (common more in the Kuban) and a two-story type (it was common among the Upper Don Cossacks in the Caucasus). The latter type was also called “semi-stone”, that is, the first floor was brick (formerly adobe, made of raw brick), the second was wooden. It is typical that the further north the settlement, the lower the first floor. On the Seversky Donets it looks more like a basement, although the characteristic features of the general Cossack building are visible here too.

The first floor, as a rule, is not residential, but economic (it was believed that “you need to live in a tree, and store supplies in stone”) - it is called “bottoms”. The center of the lower classes is the so-called “cold” room: without windows, but with small holes in the wall, arranged in a special way, allowing air to circulate in such a way that a draft constantly blew in it, cooling down in the chambers surrounding this room. The chambers border the “cold” room with a narrow corridor. The entrance inside is a narrow and low door, which usually opens inward (so that it can be easily propped up), allowing entry only one at a time, bending under the low ceiling (in the past, a pit could have been built behind the door for uninvited guests).

The main entrance to the kuren is located along a porch (“thresholds”) to the second floor, surrounded by a special terrace (“balusters”). The main room (“hall”) is separated from the front door by a vestibule. In the red corner of the hall (left opposite the entrance) there is a shrine, under it there is a table (always covered with a clean tablecloth). There were benches along the walls. There was also a stove here, and there was a “stand” (a cabinet for storing dishes with glass doors). There was always a dining table in the center of the hall. The decoration was complemented by a mirror, a hiding chest, and a bed (standing in the corner, covered with a flannelette or a blanket made from scraps).

From the hall a door led to the bedroom - to the women's half, where there was a large bed, a cradle for a baby, a chest with things, a spinning wheel... Another door from the hall went out to the men's half, that is, the room (“Gridnitsa”, “Kunatskaya” , “molodetskaya”), intended for teenagers, single Cossacks.

With any number of rooms, a kitchen (“cooking room”, “cooking room”) was necessarily allocated as a separate room, where food was prepared and eaten. One side of the kitchen also had an oven located in the living room. Here she also had a cast iron stove. There were also cabinets with dishes and supplies in the kitchen.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the owners of the kurens hastily cleaned the upper floor: this was due to the dispossession of the Don Cossacks. The one-story house was less noticeable. After the war, houses were built from wooden plates, and later - brick ones, in which practically no elements of the Cossack kuren remained.

Tags: Cossack Don, Starocherkassk, Cossacks, museum, excursion, education, village, Starocherkasskaya, kuren

We know a lot about the Cossacks. About their services to the Fatherland or heroism on the battlefields. But practically nothing is known about the everyday life of a simple Cossack, how and where did he live?

Kuren is the dwelling of the Don Cossacks, not at all like a Russian hut or a Ukrainian hut. The kuren was built from local forest: oak, poplar, alder, but log walls were quite rare. A simple Cossack used clay, stone, brushwood and even chalk to build a dwelling. Brick was used in construction only by very wealthy inhabitants of the villages.

Kuren

In large villages, such as Aksayskaya, Gnilovskaya, Starocherkasskaya and Kamenskaya, one could see two-story houses, where the upper one (tops) is divided into two halves, in the first there is an entrance hall, a hall and a bedroom, and in the second half there are three more rooms. On the ground floor (downstairs) there were three more rooms, a cellar and a glacier. Ice has been collected into the glacier since winter; the temperature here has been below freezing all year. One-story “round houses” of four rooms with 3-4 windows to the street and one “blank” wall were common. The main feature of the Cossack kuren was a balcony and a “galdareyka” or “balusters” - an external corridor covered with boards.

In addition, the kuren was equipped with a “locker” - a canopy on poles, similar to a covered balcony. You could enter the kuren via an open porch with railings. Near the kuren there was a kitchen or “cook” built of adobe and covered with reeds and earth. In the summer, the Cossacks prepared food in the kitchen and ate in the house or in the “galdareyka”.

In winter, the entire Cossack family dined in a “cook.” In the kitchen, in addition to the stove and a lot of utensils, one could find a samovar and a coffee pot. By the way, the Cossacks loved to drink tea and coffee brought from military campaigns. Balconies were often richly decorated with flowers in pots. Balconies and shutters were decorated with simple carvings.

Paintings and portraits

The decoration of the house was clean and simple. On the yellow walls of the kuren hung paintings and portraits of military chieftains and royalty, and sometimes there were checkers, rifles and souvenirs from overseas countries. There were icons in the corner of the hall. In almost all the rooms there were wooden chests covered with tin. Cossack brides had their own chest where the “dowry” was kept.

In the first room, in the left corner from the entrance, there was always a large stand or cabinet with different plates, spoons and utensils. There was also a large mirror on which photographs of family members were sometimes pasted. In the middle of the hall there was a table covered with a white tablecloth. In the hall, the Cossack received guests and treated them to wine and tea.

In the front bedroom, where there was a bed with a bunch of feather beds, pillows and multi-colored blankets, the owners of the house slept until they married their son or accepted their son-in-law into the house, then the front bedroom was intended for newlyweds. The largest room was the common bedroom, in which all the children of a large Cossack family lived.

This is how Mikhail Sholokhov described the Cossack kuren in the novel “Quiet Flows the Don”: “In the upper room, in addition to a wooden painted bed with turned pine cones in the corners, there is a chained, heavy chest with Aksinya’s dowry and clothes near the door. At the front angle there is a table, an oilcloth with General Skobelev galloping on terry banners bowed in front of him; two chairs, at the top - images in bright, miserable paper halos. On the side, on the wall, there are photographs spotted with flies.”

Tasty dinner

Visiting a Cossack for lunch, you could enjoy noodles, borscht or freshly cooked fish soup. For the second course, the Cossack “amused his darling” with a pie with cheese, jelly with kvass or kaymak - one of the Cossack’s favorite dairy delicacies. Meat dishes were rare, only during the season or on exceptional occasions, for example, at a wedding or funeral. The Cossack menu also depended on Orthodox holidays and fasts. The Don Cossacks took all fasts very seriously.

Unlike the house, the yard was not as clean. In the yard there was a cattle station, a threshing floor and a small garden.

This is how historians remember the Cossack kuren, which stood somewhere on the Don 100-200 years ago. Although, in distant villages you can still find real Cossack kurens, in which the very atmosphere is reminiscent of the past of the Cossacks. But in a couple of decades, even these farms will not remain, not to mention the old Cossack kurens.

What is the revived Cossacks

An army of fifty thousand people, supported by a billion a year and trained at the best military training grounds. A Kommersant correspondent went to study what the Kuban Cossacks are like.

EKATERINA DRANKINA

On a sultry August day, 30 km from Krasnodar, I am sitting in the boardroom of a local collective farm and for the second hour in a row listening to two men - one, about fifty years old, in civilian clothes, the other, about seventy years old, in camouflage - yell at each other.

In camouflage - ataman of the Cossack army of the village of Platnirovskaya, Vladimir Zakharovich Tikhy. He corresponds less to his formidable title than to his surname, and here they shout at him, and from time to time he only cries out pitifully:

Petrovich, this is too much! Here I disagree with you! People were at work. They followed orders. Come on, you understand?

Yeah, orders? - his interlocutor, Valery Petrovich Kolpakov, the owner of this office, soars. A group of companies located in the village has a long-standing confrontation with the local court, and not so long ago the director of one of the companies was arrested on charges of illegally organizing a rally. The judge, making a decision, was based on the testimony of witnesses - the Cossacks. In this connection, agricultural producers became somewhat angry with the Cossacks.

Is this what your free Cossacks are? - Kolpakov slams his fist on the table. - Work as witnesses, give false testimony?

Our Cossacks, ours! - the ataman drawls plaintively. - You are also a Cossack, you have an ID! But there were no false testimonies. The service was being performed.

Give yourself this ID, Zakharych! - Kolpakov makes noise. - I don’t want to be a member of such Cossacks! Our grandfathers were shot - over there, on the edge of the village, they were buried. The grandfathers were farmers and warriors, not witnesses on duty!

It’s scary to listen to raging men, but you don’t want to interrupt them either. I came to Kuban to find out what the revived Cossacks were like.

They are reviving it here in earnest:

The Kuban Cossack army, according to documents, is the largest in Russia, with about 50 thousand people, and the most expensive. The official budget of the army is 1 billion rubles. in year.

Judging by the fact that the vice-governor of the region, Nikolai Doluda, is leading the army, this is a necessary matter for the authorities. The Kuban Cossacks no longer dance or sing, as in the film of the same name - they are strong, they took Crimea, they threaten Pussy Riot, Navalny’s headquarters and everyone who behaves badly with whips.

Starting this year, every school in Kuban will have a Cossack class, and every Cossack (according to amendments to the regional land law adopted last year) will receive land. How this is treated in a region where a hectare costs more than $2 thousand was also an open question for me.

Meanwhile, the men shouted to the ground:

Where were your Cossacks when children and women were killed in Kushchevskaya? Is there an ataman in Kushchevskaya? What is he there? Is he also waiting for “earth”, like you? Give you the land...

Petrovich, why are you talking about Kushchevskaya? Well, there is an ataman there! He is afraid, he has always been afraid. The Cossacks accompanied his daughter to school so that nothing would happen. We don’t have any rights, Petrovich! - Zakharych knocks on his chest. - What can we do? As for the land, that’s what they decide... They gave us sixteen hectares, but we need to cultivate them. Pay taxes on them! They asked for a tractor, but they didn’t give it. They came to you on the collective farm, what can you do, you can farm it.

A? Fine? - Kolpakov turns to me. - These are the people. Cossacks - what are they? Community farming. Everyone has had land shares since the 90s! Who hasn't drunk it yet? They would form shares, gather a Cossack household, and here you have a revival of traditions. We would help: rather than walk arm in arm with the police, it would be better to plow the land. But no: “This is mine, it costs 200 thousand!” Those shares are lying there, but now again money for fish - we are Cossacks, give us “land and bread”! And give me a tractor and forgive the tax. Someone would forgive us for something, eh?

After shouting a little more, the villagers went about their business: Tikhiy - to the church to help the local priest unload building materials, Kolpakov - to the fields to visit the agronomists. They said goodbye hand in hand - they argued, obviously, not for the first time and not for the last.

Black boards, Yulka's robe

The Platnirovsky kuren was founded in 1794, 20 years after the destruction of the Zaporozhye Sich (and the kuren of the same name that was part of it) by order of Catherine II, by relocating the surviving Cossacks to the lands of the Kuban.

In this way, Catherine thanked the Cossacks for participating on her side in the Russian-Turkish wars: she granted the left bank of the Kuban to 38 kurens of the Cossacks, which by that time were already called the Black Sea Cossack Army. Subsequently, having replenished their ranks with Don Cossacks and other newcomers, the former Cossacks created the Kuban army.

Outwardly, these Cossacks differed from another large army - the Don - in that they still spoke Ukrainian (still the language spoken in everyday life in the Kuban is actually Surzhik, or, as the locals call it, Balachka). Well, and the uniform - Circassian and papakha.

Kuban Cossacks never had problems with employment. The Russian-Turkish and Russian-Polish wars, military operations in the Caucasus, the Russian-Japanese and the First World War - everywhere the Kuban army sent its divisions and regiments. For this they were generously rewarded. Each Cossack who reached the age of 18 received ten acres of land, so that by the age of 19, when he went to serve, he could acquire ammunition from the income from this land.

The kurens formed by the Cossacks also grew rich. The Platnirovsky kuren received the status of a village in 1842; by the beginning of the 20th century, more than 10 thousand people lived in it.

Trouble came with the revolution. The highest Cossack governing body - the Kuban Rada - decided that the time had come to realize the idea of ​​Kuban independence, and proclaimed the Kuban People's Republic with its capital in Yekaterinodar (present-day Krasnodar).

The republic lasted until 1920, and its fall was followed by repression and decossackization. The directive on decossackization was signed by Sverdlov on January 24, 1919. All Cossacks between the ages of 18 and 50 were to be taken to the North, and mass terror was to be carried out against the rich Cossacks, “exterminating them without exception.”

They started with the Terek Cossacks, but it only reached the Kuban Cossacks in the early 30s - at the time of the Holodomor. In 1933, the village of Platnirovskaya, along with 12 others, was listed on the “black boards” for “sabotage.” The surviving Cossacks tried to save their families and buried grain. Residents of the villages included in these lists were threatened with deportation.

From the villages of Poltava, Medvedovskaya, Urupskaya (according to reports, riots were being prepared there), almost all residents were deported - several tens of thousands of people. In other villages, including Platnirovskaya, evictions were carried out partially. There are 600 families left - out of 18 thousand people...

Families began to return fairly soon.

My grandparents returned in 1939,” says Ivan Yaroshenko (another ataman, Zakharych’s predecessor in this position) while we are walking around the village. - First, the grandmother came to investigate whether it was possible to return. And behind her is her grandfather. Their hut was occupied, of course, but they settled next door.

Most of all, those who returned were afraid that 1932 would repeat itself. Therefore, they hid the Cossack roots as best they could: they covered photographs, checkers, and hats in the walls. They didn’t sing songs when they talked about the Cossacks - they bit their tongues.

I asked my grandmother: “Grandmother, am I a Cossack?” And she quietly said to me: “Yes, all the Cossacks are gone,” says Ivan Alekseevich.

This fear lasted for a long time. Already when the Cossack movement began, in the early 90s, people went to meetings with caution.

I, as an old man, will put on everything there - well, a Circassian coat, a hat, and throw Yulka’s robe on top and go like that,” Grandfather Nikolai, a cunning old man born in 1936 who survived both famine and deportation, laughs lightly.

Grandfather Nikolai is now also a registered Cossack of the Kuban army. Once a year he goes to training camps and goes to the Cossack circle. He does not receive a salary - it is due only to those who are members of the Cossack squad, 22 thousand rubles. per person.

I didn’t go to “take Crimea” either. No one made it from Platnirovskaya: when the Cossacks were called, they were ordered to have money with them (later they would return it, but so as not to beg on the road), but the Platnirovskys, says grandfather Nikolai, were not given their wives, so they had to go back.

The former ataman of the Kuban army, 67-year-old Vladimir Gromov, has a large beautiful house in a prestigious place near Krasnodar - the Lenin farm on the edge of the village of Pashkovskaya. There is a garden around the house, which he, groaning, cultivates: “I foolishly took the largest plot when the Cossacks were given land, I thought I would have enough health for another hundred years - but no!”

Gromov also did not offend his own Pashkov Cossacks with land: under his atamanship, they received one of the largest plots - 400 hectares.

They are, of course, so-so farmers - they grew only weeds, but while I was an ataman, they did not touch them, they did not take the land. And when my time was up, I had to help them. The land was quickly re-registered and turned into a gardening partnership. Well, at least that way...

In Gromov’s library there are many icons, Cossack photographs and a real throne - a gift from the grateful Cossacks.

He is a well-known and respected figure: it all started with him. In the mid-80s, Vladimir Gromov, associate professor of the history department of Kuban State University, created a circle to study the history of the Cossacks. In 1989, the Kuban Cossack club was formed on its basis, and then a Cossack amateur association at the house of culture.

Those who say that the revival of the Cossacks in the 90s was a Kremlin project simply were not here in Kuban. It was so massive! Such a powerful explosion! The authorities didn’t like this for quite a long time, but then they realized that they had to be friends with the Cossacks...

In the summer of 1990, the Great Cossack Circle took place in Moscow. The Kuban Cossacks were numerically superior to the Don Cossacks, but the Don Cossack, Alexander Martynov, was chosen as the leader of the Cossack Union created in this circle.

“I, of course, had authority,” recalls Vladimir Gromov. - But Martynov had the opportunity to receive everyone in Moscow and accommodate them. He had a business - a large automobile enterprise, and in Moscow they had a hostel, it seems, in 1905. So he became the main one.

By joint efforts, by April 1991, the law “On the Rehabilitation of the Cossacks” was issued. And three years later in Kuban there were no longer dozens, but hundreds of Cossack associations.

Gromov became the ataman of the Kuban army, but there was also an “all-Kuban army”, and dozens of individual atamans with their own units.

The ideas for which the atamans fought were mainly nationalistic: to prevent the “Caucasian caliphate”, to resist “Islamization”, to punish migrant workers who “behave badly”.

The most sensational story of those years was the case of the Domanin gang. A participant in the Chechen wars, Sergei Domanin returned to Kuban, to his hometown of Timashevsk, in the mid-90s. Under the slogans of the revival of the Cossacks and the protection of law and order, he put together a gang that was engaged in kidnappings, murders and robberies for several years.

Domanin died in April 1997 during a clash with police officers. Representatives of the Cossacks from all over the region came to his funeral.

In front of the funeral procession, according to Cossack customs, they led the orphaned white horse Domanin, carried his saber and all his awards.

A few months later there was a trial of gang members, 22 people received sentences ranging from eight to 20 years.

There were many openly gangster stories in the 90s, and yet today’s Cossacks are not unanimous in their assessments of that period.

Then why did people become Cossacks? “To fight the bandits,” Vladimir Petrovich Zatsepsky, a resident of the neighboring village of Platnirovskaya, explains to me. - And they fought. I remember they caught an Armenian rapist - he raped a girl here, they beat him back with whips. So they were imprisoned for six years! There were also fighting Cossacks in the Temryuk region - they were simply killed. And Gromov’s - they were on a budget. No, Gromov is a good person, but he kept putting us on edge... Why would a Cossack sit idle? He needs to fight, maintain order...

Gromov says that under him there was not a lot of budget for the Cossacks, not like now, but his army did have power, and considerable power:

Can you imagine when a thousand Cossacks on the square demand the resignation of the governor? Can deputies raise their hands against it? That's how it happened on June 30, 1992. The army demanded his resignation, and Governor Dyakonov was removed!

However, the former chieftain is also proud of the fact that for a long time he fought off the claims of politicians against the Cossacks:

Serious people came and tried to negotiate so that the Cossacks would go to the Caucasus to fight.

Berezovsky tried to seat me next to him on the presidium, but I didn’t go. I told them all this: you will leave, but we will stay. The Caucasian peoples are our neighbors. We need to be very careful with them.

Gromov was an ataman for 17 years. He speaks evasively about what preceded his non-nomination in 2007: “I knew that I would no longer be an ataman. The authorities decided so. Am I going to throw myself under this train? They will move and forget! And I also knew that my atamans would not support me. They had already acquired something: some had a store, some had a market, some had land - there was something to hook them on, so I just didn’t move forward myself.”

There were rumors that they threatened to open a criminal case against Gromov, but these rumors were not confirmed in any way, and since 2007 he has been a deputy of the legislative assembly of the Krasnodar Territory.

Gromov is critical of the current Cossacks. I don’t like that I’ve become too close to the state and have lost my freedoms, but most of all I’m outraged by the whips:

Now you go into any Cossack store - whips of all stripes hang. What is it for? I am categorically against the Cossacks coming out with whips. The Cossack took the whip in his hands when he mounted his horse. And now here and there you hear that someone was whipping someone with a whip. How is this? Did the person break the law? Detain them according to the law, but don’t swing whips and disgrace the Cossacks - that’s not necessary.

In the Cossack circle in 2007, the candidacy of the vice-governor of the region Nikolai Doluda was supported. He is originally from the Kharkov region, not of Cossack origin, but a career military man. But he is the closest associate of the former governor Tkachev (evil tongues even talk about joint property registered in the name of children) and the permanent vice-governor under his successor.

Two worlds, one camouflage

I wish you good health, gentlemen Cossacks! - shouts Nikolai Doluda, military ataman of the Kuban Cossack army.

We wish you good health, Mr. Ataman! - Having lined up awkwardly, the Cossacks of different ages answer.

Over the next ten minutes, Doluda raises the morale of those gathered with a speech about how the Cossacks “in the fourteenth year closed the borders of their homeland with their breasts”, “did not allow these Banderaites onto Russian soil”, that the Cossacks are “first of all warriors” and should always be ready.

Doluda goes around the army, paternally asking whether everyone is fed, whether it was too cold to sleep during the training camp, whether the Cossacks liked their dinner. He offers to continue the exercises - and the trainees take their places near the platforms, explaining how to use different types of ammunition:

To undermine this steel cable, three TNT blocks are needed, they interrupt both the cable and the rod...

The Cossacks crowd around the explainer in a crowd; the grandfather and the boy are let forward so that they can be seen better. One of those gathered is a priest, Father Nikolai, a fit, muscular young man in camouflage. He proudly tells me that he showed the best results at the shooting ranges.

But, I heard that a Cossack who supported Navalny was expelled from the army - how do you feel about this?

“I have a very positive attitude towards this,” Father Nikolai readily supports the slippery topic. - Penance was imposed on him! Because he betrayed his comrades. He betrayed the ideology... of his brothers!

After getting ready, I try to talk to Doluda. It's not so simple: unlike the simple-minded father Nikolai, the vice-governor wants to talk only about what he wants.

As part of a tripartite agreement between the administration of the Krasnodar Territory, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Kuban Cossack Army, 1,652 Cossacks serve as part of the police to protect public order. Other areas of work in accordance with Federal Law 154 are border protection, ensuring environmental and fire safety, eliminating the consequences of natural disasters, participating in combating drug trafficking,” Nikolai Alexandrovich reported clearly, in a military manner.

Regarding the Cossack attack on Navalny’s headquarters: “No one has proven that these were Cossacks of the Kuban army.” Pussy Riot whipping: “I don’t want to talk about it and I won’t.”

Even the relationship between the authorities and the Cossacks seems to be divorced for him, the vice-governor and the ataman, in different angles: going to Crimea in 2014, he “took leave at his own expense from work,” just like a thousand Cossacks who went there because “First of all, I am a patriot.”

Nikolai Aleksandrovich believes in the prospects of Cossack agriculture, unlike my friend the head of the collective farm from Platnirovskaya: “In accordance with the changes made three years ago to the Land Code, land can be transferred to Cossack communities without bidding, and the governor of the Krasnodar Territory ordered the allocation of from 300 to 500 hectares of land for each regional Cossack community. At the end of last year, 13.5 thousand hectares were allocated, and this work continues. 12 Cossack agricultural cooperatives have been created on these lands, the first results of their work will appear at the end of the year.”

The attack on Alexei Navalny and several of his associates occurred at Anapa airport in May 2016. Two dozen people in Cossack hats first poured milk on the activists and then beat them.

In the video that the Anapa city Cossack society KKV posted on its page on VKontakte, Koshevoy Ataman Nikolai Nesterenko was identified in the crowd of attackers.

On the same page there is a lot of local news: the article “Kuban Cossacks are ready to liberate Zaporozhye and Ukraine”, news about the ceremonial presentation of Cossack military uniforms to the 1K (Cossack) class of a local school on September 1, but there is nothing about the further fate of Nesterenko. And fate is interesting.

Nikolai Nesterenko was a well-known businessman in the city (he controlled the city market), had a conflict with local deputy businessman Sergei Zirinov, and in 2013 became the target of an assassination attempt (he was wounded and the driver died).

Sergei Zirinov was accused of organizing this attempt, and in the fall of this year the court sentenced him to 22 years in prison. And the very next day after the verdict was announced, a criminal case was opened against Nesterenko.

He was accused of illegally privatizing his own dacha near Anapa. This summer the verdict was announced: six and a half years in prison.

I discuss this story with 72-year-old Zaur, sitting in his house in the Adyghe village of Psebe.

I visit Anapa a lot, we sell hazelnuts there - our entire village is engaged in this. There, people remember Nesterenko with good words, they say that the man believed in his work. He’s not young anymore, but he seriously fought with this mafia... He fought, of course, there was one gang there, and they put him behind the dacha...

And those who stand with the police in finery are not very... They call them mummers... We have one guy here who, like everyone else, sells hazelnuts. And here he is driving a car, the trunk full of hazelnuts. His outfit stops him, the Cossacks. The Cossack tells him: “Check on the roads! Podesaul Potapenko!” And he quickly answers: “Well then, I am Prince Shkhalakhov!”

The Cossack smiled and released him.

The “prince” went to sell hazelnuts, and the “podesaul” stayed to help the police.

Maria Liberman took part in the preparation of the material