Volga Tatars - Settlements

The rural Tatar population of the Volga-Ural region resides mostly in the 1,659 villages of Tatarstan and Bashkirstan (807 and 852 respectively). Today there are no villages with an exclusively Tatar population. Even as only one of the components of the physiognomy of multiethnic villages (usually of the strip-and-cluster type), Tatar houses are easily identifiable, however, because of their architecture and decoration. The main construction material, for rich and poor alike, is wood. Stone gained popularity with the well-to-do peasants only in the nineteenth century. The houses of the Volga Tatars are built according to two main floor plans: simple one-room dwellings with an attached planked porch (average size: 6 by 8 meters, including the porch); two-room, hexagonal-shaped dwellings, actually constructed by linking with a corridor two traditional one-room houses. The room used by the family every day faces the street and is called kara yak (the black side), whereas the room reserved for guests is called ak yak (the white side). Houses were surrounded by high fences and gates.

Well-to-do peasants built two- and even three-story houses, observing the same floor plan. The houses of the rich were distinguished not only by their size, building material (sometimes stone), and the lavish decorations, but also by the fact that they were laid across the property, rather than being parallel to the street. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the distance between the houses (of rich and poor peasants alike) and the streets began diminishing, and today there are many houses whose walls stand on the property line facing the street.