The Russian hut is replete with patterns and ornaments. Beautiful, elegant, sometimes florid, but not only. The ornament does not decorate, but like a talisman protects the inner living space from the outside world, spontaneous, disordered, opposing the house, hearth, harmony.
What is the hut? A simple, rough, rough wooden blockhouse, and entirely decorated with platbands and shutters framing the window openings, crowned with a "horse", "quays", "towel" on the roof. Take a closer look: on the frames - circles, lines, on the shutters - again circles, rhombuses, squares, lines, zigzags, on the quaysides and a towel - all the same geometry, shape, ornament, amulet. What do these simple, clear outlines symbolize?
The sun
The curious viewer, who turns his gaze to the facade of the Russian hut, will not escape the abundance of solar signs, cut or cut in the form of a circle, a circle with a cross inside, a semicircle with lines diverging in different directions - the sun's rays, in the form of a lush, patterned rosette a la baroque. The sun illuminates the earth, every corner of it, warms with warm rays. The sun gives light, opposes darkness, and therefore everything that darkness generates: fears, troubles, ignorance. Depicted on the "brushes", i.e. the ends of the pits - inclined boards covering the roof of the roof from the side of the facade, as well as depicted on the "towel" - a board that hides the junction of the piers, the sun protects the hut, its household from the unclean, hostile, dark.
Carved at the bottom of the left quay, left in relation to the one looking at the facade of the house, the solar sign shows sunrise, and on the right quay - sunset. The rising, as well as the setting, the sun is most often depicted below the earth - a rectangle - after all, the sun is just about to rise or, conversely, has already set. Sometimes half of the sun sign is placed above the ground in the form of an upward arc with three rays - the sun rises or sets. Often the sun is already shown as having risen, respectively, located above the ground, depicted by a crossed square, a symbol of fertility.
At the ends of the piers, you can also see the "running" sun: inside the circle, several arcuate lines are carved radially, which certainly creates the feeling of a rolling wheel with curved volumetric spokes - after all, it is at sunrise and sunset that the movement of the heavenly body relative to the horizon is so noticeable.
The midday sun rises on a "towel", the upper part of the facade, under the very "horse", "goof", who headed the gable roof. Depicting midday, craftsmen carved two suns, usually the same size with six rays, or one sun was "running", like morning and evening. Often, above the sun or inside the circle-sun, you can also see the image of an Orthodox cross, which endows the sun with the same sacred, apotropic power that the cross possesses, the power that can drive out the demonic, the unkind.
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Earth
Solar symbolism is always accompanied by the image of the earth or field. The sun is always represented relative to the earth, which corresponds to the geocentric ideas of our great-grandfathers. A rhombus drawn along and across, a square set at an angle and divided into four parts, a rectangle - all this is a symbolic, conventional designation of a plowed land, a sown field. All these are simple and inconspicuous geometrical figures, with which the quilts, and platbands, and shutters, and gates are full of - simple, but original decoration of the Russian hut.
Ornaments symbolizing earth are usually not used in midday midday compositions. But there are also exceptions. If the earth is depicted on a towel, then it is necessarily associated with the sun: either the solar ball illuminates the earth approaching it from above and below, or a small earth symbol is between two "running" circles and becomes comprehensively illuminated by the sun's rays.
Sky
The symbol of the sun is unimaginable in the ornament without the image of the earth, warmed by a heavenly body. The solar sign is unthinkable even without the firmament. So the upper part of the gable pediment of the house appears before us as a firmament, along which the sun makes its daytime journey, starting in the east (left quay), reaching the zenith (a towel crowning the quays), and ending in the west (right quay).
The consciousness of the bearer of traditional culture assumed not only the presence of the sun and its path across the sky, but also the sky itself, as a container of water. "The abyss of heaven", which, according to our ancestors, spewing rain, thunderstorms, lightning, is something different, different from the firmament, the repository of the stars: the sun and stars. Wavy, straight and intersecting lines, patterned ornaments from towns, merging into waves, like streams of rain, spill over the quays, float in two or three rows, interspersed with small circles - rain drops, fall to the ground, irrigating it, fertilizing it. And where the land is, there is harvest. Where there is harvest, there is a man. Where a person is, there is a house, a hut is a microcosm in a macrocosm, an exact copy of the original, protected and illuminated by the sun, moistened by rains, teeming with crops.