materials and techniques

Materials and techniques

Most of today's remaining traditional houses date from the so-called Bulgarian national revival period (1830-70). These houses are never of monumental dimensions due to the political situation during the Ottoman occupation. Their charm resides rather in their welcoming interiors and numerous ornamental details: door carvings, wooden ceilings, cupboards.

While the ground floor usually adapts to the relief of the site, the upper floor often extends some tens of cm from the ground floor, recovering amplier dimensions. The result is a particular volumetry, visible throughout the country.

The traditional building techniques have evolved over centuries. Every region has developed her own style, influenced by the geographic and climatic conditions and the available resources.

The main building materials traditionally employed in Bulgaria are stone, wood and earth. These basic materials are frequently used in combination in order to enhance each other's qualities.

Stone

Stone is mainly available in mountainous regions or close to big rivers. It is employed for the foundations and when available in quantity, also for the whole ground floor and the north and west walls of upper floors. In order to improve the buildings’ resistance to earthquakes, stone walls are stabilized with wooden ring beams at regular heights (0.6-1m). Again in the mountains, flat stones (called tikli) with dimensions up to 1m*1m are also used for roof covering. They are laid over a strong wooden timber frame and are fixed by their weight, simply recovering each over.

Wood

The most commonly used essences for building are oak and pine. Traditionally, the trees were felled close to the construction site and immediately transformed into beams and planks with specialized hand tools. In the past, craftsmen cut their wood only in the winter and left the material dry for at least one year before building with it. Nowadays, wood is cut all year long, transformed with machines at saw mills and rarely let dry.
Wood is present at every step of the building process: as re-enforcement in the stone walls, as framework for earth in-fill, as roof, as floor and finally as furniture and decoration.

Earth

In Bulgaria, raw earth is widely used as a building material. Often associated with stone or wood it is present in almost every region. The most frequently used building techniques are wattle and daub, adobe bricks and in some northern regions also rammed earth. Besides employed for the confection of self standing walls or as infill in wooden frames, earth is also commonly used as mortar in stone masonry, as plaster or mixed with straw for ceiling insulation.