The transnational nature of the Balkans houses: an ethnographic analysis

One hundred years after the publication of Jovan Cvijić’s La pèninsule balkanique — geographie humaine (Balkan Peninsula: human geography), regarding the building types that have contributed to the housing culture of the Balkan Peninsula, we can highlight how the boundaries of these ways of life have perhaps been more transient than one could have considered a century ago. Following this key, we see that the word kuća, as it happens for the word sofa of the Ottoman house, indicates, in the simplest examples, a single space that is the house itself, (vatrë in the Albanian variant); we find that the Carso-Mediterranean house made of stone is extending along the whole Balkan Adriatic coast, and again that the Dinaric house is often completed by a wooden pergola called çârdâk from Ottoman-Turkish ( چارطاق “arbour, summerhouse”), that the Moravian house, composed of three planimetric elements (ajat, kuća and soba) is not so different from the planimetric layout of the Ottoman house with (hajat, sofa and oda), which then takes on a fortified appearance in the kula examples. All these variations are different combinations of recurring compositional elements that were combined with the architectural languages of the various climatic regions and of the various cultural and anthropological traditions.