The legendary dwelling of the pagan goddess, and also the character of everyone's favorite fairy tales - Baba Yaga, in fact, has quite real prototypes in everyday life among the ancient Slavs, and not only.
The fact is that, thanks to folklore and artists, we have long perceived the Hut on the chicken legs of Baba Yaga as an infernal living dwelling that can move on huge legs. In reality, there were huts on chicken legs, BUT the word chicken is not associated with chicken, but has a different meaning. Chicken legs are stumps or logs of trees freed from bark and fumigated with smoke to prevent rotting and pests on which huts were placed. True, there is still a moment of mysticism in this story, but more on that later.
For many centuries, the Slavs practiced the construction of huts and barns on such chicken legs. The raised structure was thus also protected from river floods, floods, pests, even mice and snakes.
Most likely, the mysticism and infernality of the famous hut on chicken legs is associated with the rites of the ancient Slavs. The fact is that before the consolidation of Christianity in Russia, the cremated dead were often practiced. The corpses were burnt on ritual fires, then the ashes were placed in special forest houses on such chicken legs, which served as family tombs.
In the twentieth century, archaeologists more than once found similar houses on excavations of ancient settlements, where they found the ashes of sometimes several dozen people, often placed in burnt urns.
It is not difficult to guess that the Hut on chicken legs, which is inextricably linked with the image of Baba Yaga in fairy tales, is most likely not just a house, but a tomb in which the witch Yaga lives. Moreover, Baba Yaga is partly a transformed image of the goddess Mara (the goddess of death and the other world). Baba-Yaga, by the way, always has a bone leg, just in order to stand with one leg in the next world. That is, Babaya-Yaga is a chthonic creature serving as an assistant for getting to the next world, therefore it is the place for her to live in the "tomb".
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