Turf Houses In Iceland

Title

Turf Houses In Iceland

Artist

Patricia Hofmeester

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

Traditional turf houses in Icelandic landscape

For a country settled in 930 AD and inhabited ever since, you may have noticed that Icelanders have very few historic buildings of note. While most other European states have castles and ruins that date back hundreds and even thousands of years, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything built before the 19th Century in Iceland.

The reason for this is that the vast majority of Iceland’s buildings were made to be disposable. With an extreme and fickle climate, a lack of decent building materials, virtually no infrastructure and the poverty of the people themselves, early Icelanders had to be creative when constructing their homes. As such, the Icelandic turf house was born.

Turf houses are, quite simply, semi-underground abodes with a grassy roof, not unlike the Hobbit homes in Lord of the Rings.

They were built by stacking flat stones to create the foundation, using birch or driftwood to create frames, then covering the structure with several layers of turf. A door would mark the entrance, and there were occasionally small windows (although few made of glass, a rare commodity). On the roof, there would usually be a small hole for ventilation, which could be closed in bad weather with a lid made of animal guts stretched over a barrel ring.

Though it was true that Iceland was covered in birch forests when first settled, Icelandic birch was pretty useless in building anything more than the aforementioned frames and door. Turf, however, was known to be insulating by the Norwegians when they arrived and was adopted as a primary material for houses pretty much immediately.

Thank you for visiting my art galeries. If you like visiting other countries but you can't do that in person or want to reminisce, feel free to look at my many galeries and enjoy for instance landscapes and landmarks from all over the world.

See more of my ICELAND work:
https://pixels.com/profiles/patricia-hofmeester?tab=artworkgalleries&artworkgalleryid=761370

See more of my galleries at: https://pixels.com/profiles/patricia-hofmeester

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February 6th, 2018

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