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A burdei or bordei (, )"бурдей" in Etymolohichnyĭ Slovnyk Ukraïns′koï Movy ( Etymological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language), O.S. Mel′nychuk, Vol. 1, 1982. is a type of pit-house or half-dugout shelter, somewhat between a sod house and a log cabin. This style is native to the Carpathian Mountains and of Eastern Europe.
In Romania, it is a traditional "rustic" house made of clay and built below the earth's surface. Variations on how deep underground the burdei is built depends between houses. The underground style of construction and the use of clay materials ensures heating with minimal resources during harsh winters. The burdei style is still utilised to this day, usually among shepherd communities in the mountainsides.
The etymology of the word is Romanian, and can be found in Albanian as well, due to a shared Thracian origin. Borde in Albanian means "hole".
The Grubenhaus was erected over a rectangular pit, ranging in size from four square meters to twenty-five square meters of floor area. During the 6th and 7th centuries the sunken buildings east and south of the Carpathians, were under 15 square meters in floor surface.Florin Curta The Making of Slavs p. 282 The experiments of the Archeological Open-Air Museum in Březno near Louny have reconstructed the living and temperature conditions in the dug houses. History
The building experiment consisted of two houses, which were exact replicas of two sunken buildings excavated on the site, one of the late sixth or early seventh century, the other of the ninth. The sixth- to seventh-century feature was relatively large (4.20 x 4.60 m) and deep (80 cm under the original ground). The excavation of the rectangular pit represented some fifteen cubic meters of earth. The excavation, as well as other, more complex, operations, such as binding horizontal sticks on the truss or felling and transport of trees, required a minimum of two persons. The building of the house took 860 hours, which included the felling of trees for rafters and the overall preparation of the wood. Building the actual house required 2.2 cubic meters of wood (ash, oak, and beech). In itself, the superstructure swallowed two cubic meters of wood. Three to four cubic meters of clay were necessary for daubing the walls and reeds harvested from some 1,000 square meters, for the covering of the superstructure. Assuming sixty to seventy working hours per week and a lot more experience and skills for the early medieval builders, the house may have been built in three to four weeks.59 - Florin Curta.Pleinerová 1986:113–14 and 139. Various prohibitions (e.g., selection of the building site, propitious time for starting the building, etc.), as well as a number of ritual practices pertaining to the symbolism attached to the house, some of which are known from the ethnographic evidence, may have considerably delayed the building process.
It is said that when King Charles I came to Romania he saw smoke coming out of the snow on the ground and he asked what it is. He was told "It is the Romanian people, your majesty, they live underground."
from Imperial Russia settled in the Hillsboro region of Kansas, and also built burdei housings as temporary shelters. This type of shelter was also called a zemlyanka or a saraj (a Low German spelling for a Russian word meaning "shed"). The March 20, 1875, issue of the national weekly newspaper Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper described the structures:
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