Kamara house
The Kamara house is a traditional house shape on the Greek island of Crete . It is very common to find in the regions of Sfakia , Kydonia , Apokorona , Rethymno and also in the far east of Crete. You can also find this type of construction on Rhodes or Karpathos and less often on other Greek islands.
Usually, has the dimensions of about 8 by 5 meters and is a Kamara house alongside divided by an arch, καμάρα ( Kamára ) mentioned. For reasons of stability, the arch never reaches the outer walls. The long sides of the house are mostly facing the street, with an entrance door in the middle. The back wall is often formed on the uphill side by standing rock. Very large Kamara houses can also be laid out on two floors. One of the four niches of the large room spanned by the arch is almost always occupied by a cooking and fireplace, which in turn is covered by a smaller arch at right angles to the main arch. On the side of the house opposite the fireplace, there are usually some chambers. The outer and inner walls are made of uncut natural stone, joined together with mortar , the flat roof construction was originally made of transverse wooden beams, which carried a wickerwork of twigs or smaller logs, which was sealed with clay and straw.
A similar, simpler design is the Kentis house , it is regarded as the predecessor of the Kamara house. In the mostly smaller Kentis house, the elaborate brick arch has been replaced by a strong longitudinal beam, which is supported over a third of its length by a support (κέντης Kentis ), the room layout is similar to that of the Kamara house. If a correspondingly long wooden beam was not available, two shorter ones were used instead; in this case the column was located under the point where both beams overlap. An intermediate form of both house types, sometimes called Pro-Kamara-Haus , is also constructed with a longitudinal beam instead of a stone arch, but the load-bearing beam was placed on two short stub walls protruding lengthways into the room. This design already has the same floor plan as the Kamara house, but the stonemasonry and building experience required for the construction of the arch could be dispensed with.
Today, many of the Kamara houses, which are often over 200 years old, can be found as abandoned ruins, the typical arch that gives it its name is mostly still preserved. Some houses in the Sfakia are believed to be five to six hundred years old. The elaborate house design of the Kamara houses can only be found in permanently populated villages and cities, hardly in areas with scattered settlement.
literature
- Oliver Rackham, Jennifer Moody: The making of the Cretan landscape . 1996, Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-3647-X