A lesson in Living Ethnology

[emmuzka]

a month ago I helped my friend to clean up a place of her relatives that passed away a couple of years ago. I would never have thought how intersting pictures I would get.


The estate was built sometime right after 1900. The first building was the stable building where they kept the work horse and the cows.


This is the place where the hired help slept. On the right is the work area for iron working.


The main house.


Our car, looking very out of place ;)


The attic. As you can see, there is no insulation. Luckily, there wasn't that much stuff, either.


I took these pics standing in the stairway, fearing that I would crash through the roof if I'd actually step in the attic.


The old smoke sauna. The picture looks lovely but there were actually lots of barbed wire laying around here, so we had to careful with our steps.


Those rocks might not look like much, but they are actually the hand operated stones that grinded flour. They should be in musem. (and as you can read, I have totally forgotten all the English names for the stuff)


Then there was riihi which was used for drying out and storing the barley. It was huge.


Like this.


And did I mention huge?


Yes, I took inside pictures, too, but the building was in a too bad shape for me to post anything remotely pretty. Anyway, it's sad that the building were left a shape so bad that now they will be taken down.

Comments

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

The sauna looks uncannily like the ancient cabin in the woods that my grand-uncle lived in until he was almost a 100 years old. About a dozen people used to live in that tiny cabin, in the 19th and early 20th century - by the 1990s only my grand-uncle was left. The place used to seriously creep me out.

[2ndbs.livejournal.com]

Stones for grinding flour are called millstones according to my dictionary. And riihi is called drying barn.

[emmuzka.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I have studied ethnology but you have a wicked dictionary. :)