Original houses in the Czech villages in Romania had so-called black kitchens. In them, a fire was lit in a fire pit, which was a rectangular space made from bricks. An open chimney was built above it, through which the smoke was directed out of the room and into the chimney. The chimney is therefore not just the part we see on the roof, but a structure that runs through the whole house.
The black kitchen was connected to the other two rooms – the parlour and the back room. These rooms were heated by a stove, the smoke from which was led through brick partitions into the chimney. This method of heating was maintained in the region for a long time, until the 20th century. By contrast, open chimneys do not appear in the Czech lands very often, because they started to be banned at the end of the 18th century, mainly due to fire regulations.
The chimney above the roof is wooden, complete with wooden weatherboards to prevent wind from damaging the chimney structure.
The open chimney is like an inverted funnel with an almost square base, which gradually narrows upwards and leads to the chimney. The open chimeny was located above half of the black kitchen area. It was either made of brick, or of a wood and wicker smeared with a thick layer of mud or clay. On one side the chimney was set against the outer wall of the kitchen, on two sides against the inner walls separating the kitchen from the rooms, and on the fourth side it was supported by a solid wooden beam. The chimney was black and soot-stained on the inside. It was also used for smoking. The old chimneys have not been preserved in Garnic, but they can still be found in Rovensko or Bígr.
Chimney stacks are the part of the chimney structure visible on the roof. They are made of the same material as the whole chimney, either brick, or wicker, wood and clay.
Brick chimneys also had brick chimney stacks. The top of the chimney stack was had a semicircular or triangular shape.
Wooden chimney stacks also had wooden chimney structures. Above the roof, they were sheathed with boards, decorated with ornamental mouldings, or covered with shingles. The chimney opening used to have a gable roof on top covered with fired tiles, shingles and, later, sheet metal. Unfortunately, wooden chimneys can no longer be found in Garnic, but you can see them in Bígr, where they are still many. Remains of the old brick chimneys can still be seen on many houses in Garnic today.
Over time, people stopped using open chimneys and replaced them with wooden ceilings over the entire area of the black kitchen. The fire pit was gradually removed in the first half of the 20th century and replaced by stoves. The part of the chimney in the attic area either remained unchanged or was partially demolished. It was still used for smoke extraction, but also for smoking food. The shape of the chimney above the roof level did not usually undergo any changes. The downstairs rooms started using more powerful stoves and separate chimneys, which led directly above the roof or into a modified chimney, which remained after the smoke stack had been removed. Later, precast concrete structures of various shapes also began to appear on roofs.
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Projekt byl podpořen z prostředků Ministerstva zahraničních věcí ČR v rámci projektů veřejné diplomacie.
