Borie
As Borie one mainly is Provence in southern France encountered construction of dry stone referred in rural areas.
etymology
The term is a Frenchized and feminized derivation of the masculine Provencal expression bôrie (see also Occitan , feminine: bôria ), which in the 19th century was pejorative in the sense of “break house” ( masure ), “poor hut” ( cahute , e.g. by Frédéric Mistral in his dictionary Tresor doû Felibrige ) and later also referred to a farm , a dairy or an estate from the 17th or 18th century (according to place-names and document archives ).
The word borie, meaning “hut made of dry stone”, was popularized by Provençal scholars in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries to give an archaeological tinge to an all-too-contemporary study object of purely ethnological importance .
The remnants of temporary or provisional accommodations, which until then were "huts" for their village owners, were given a name that was previously used in Provence for a type of permanent housing that had become rare even then. The term was picked up in the 1960s by Pierre Desaulle in his book Les Bories de Provence , used in the 1970s by Pierre Viala , the founder of the Village des Bories (village of stone huts, near Gordes ) and finally in 1990 by the Luberon Regional Nature Park ( Parc naturel régional du Luberon ) with the publication of the book Bories .
The name reached the Périgord in the 1970s , where it was limited to the meaning of emigrant farm ( ferme isolée ) and competed with the local names cabane , chabano or chebano . In still other areas there are other names (e.g. capitelles or caselles ).
function
The smaller round huts only offered space for two to four people and served - especially in wine-growing regions - as shelters for field guards or for villagers and farmers who cultivated lands far away from their communities. Long structures usually served as stables or as storage rooms for hay and straw .
- Borien
Borie near Aurel (Vaucluse)
Le Village des bories
Large long hut made of dry stone (near Saumane )
Old wagon barn, built according to the principle of the cantilever vault (near Gordes)
Dating and regional distribution
Bories are commonly found only in south-eastern France, especially in the departments of Vaucluse , Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and Bouches-du-Rhône . Some nineteenth-century scholars declared them to be structures of Neolithic , Ligurian, or Waldensian origin , without ever providing proper evidence and despite the poor durability of any mortarless limestone masonry . Popular literature on Provence and the accompanying texts of numerous photo books hold on to these errors.
Most of today's buildings date from the 18th and 19th centuries; in no documented case they arose before the 17th century. The reclamation of large areas shortly before and after the French Revolution provided the enormous quantities of field stone that were necessary for the construction of the stone huts.
The municipalities in the Vaucluse department that still have Bories today are Apt , Bonnieux (over 200), Buoux , Forcalquier , Gordes , Lacoste , Ménerbes , Murs , Saignon , Saumane , Venasque (240), Viens and Villes-sur-Auzon .
An area outside Gordes (Vaucluse), which is registered in the Napoleonic cadastre as Savournins Bas and was still colloquially called Les Cabanes ('the huts') by the inhabitants of the wine region in the 1970s , was named Village des bories (' Dorf der Steinhütten ') to the much-visited open-air museum of this type of structure.
architecture
There are two types of bories: one is the shape of a round beehive hut with a doorway; on the other hand the shape of a rectangular long building with a door and one or more window hatches. All openings are narrow and low throughout; the outer walls are at least 50 cm thick. Both types of construction can reach heights of three to four meters, with the tallest examples being clearly round buildings. The slightly angled door openings usually close at the top with a stone lintel - corbels are just as rare here as vaults. A replica of a small borie in 1964 required around 300,000 stones with a total weight of around 180 t. In some buildings the effort to evenly arranged stone layers can be seen; in other buildings irregular walls are predominant.
builder
The builders of the Bories were probably rural self-taught ; regardless of this, older texts claim the existence of (wandering) stonecutters who would have specialized in the art of building with dry stones.
Construction techniques
walls
The builders of the Bories used rounded, but also flat stones, roughly or slightly carved - these were placed almost flush with one another; small remaining gaps were sometimes filled with pieces of stone. The mostly round floor plan stabilized the building; It is not known whether tree trunks stabilized the rising masonry of the long structures during the construction phase.
Vault
The cantilever vault technique moves each individual stone layer a little inwards in relation to the one below; In addition, most of the capstones, but also some of the wall stones, are slightly inclined outwards in order to better drain rainwater. Whether wooden support frames and / or beams were used in the construction of the vault is controversial in research.
Layout
Most bories have an approximately circular floor plan with a diameter of around 2 to 3 m and are usually significantly smaller than the long buildings, but higher. With a rectangular floor plan, however, greater room depths and usable areas were achieved. The entrances or window openings are mostly narrow and low.
Other buildings
The Luberon area is famous for its interesting bories; however, stone walls have also been found here that serve no apparent purpose. There are walls 10 to 20 m long and a maximum of 4 m wide that are only a few meters apart.
See also
literature
- Bories (= Luberon images et signes. 4). Edisud, Aix-en-Provence 1994, ISBN 2-85744-720-5 .
- Pierre Coste, Pierre Martel: Pierre sèche en Provence (= Les Alpes de Lumière. No. 89/90). Alpes de Lumière Salagon, Mane 1986, ISBN 2-906162-00-0 .
- Christian Lassure: Cabanes en pierre sèche de France. Photographies de Dominique Repérant. Éditions Édisud, Aix-en-Provence 2004, ISBN 2-7449-0449-X .
- Gerhard Rohlfs : Primitive domed buildings in Europe (= Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Philosophical-Historical Class. Treatises. NF 43, ISSN 0005-710X ). Publishing house of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich 1957.
