Hey everyone, it's Danielle from Exploring Alternatives.
In this video we're going to tour a traditional Icelandic turf house.
Turf houses are the original green buildings because they source local materials.
Here in Southern Iceland that means they're using turf from the local wetlands and lava
stones.
Building thick walls like this insulates the houses against wind and cold weather.
And another really interesting thing about them is that they're built to be recycled
and reused so one turf house will last for one generation and then the next generation
will tear it down, install new turf but reuse all the old stones.
The stones you'll see in these houses have been reused over and over for generations.
Most turf houses in Iceland were torn down after World War II when people were encouraged
to modernize their homes which means there's almost no turf houses left.
So we're really lucky to be here at this turf house museum in Southern Iceland and we're
going to meet with Hannes who runs the museum and whose grand parents and great grandparents
used to live and run this farm.
This is definitely the last one that was lived in, in this area.
It was lived in and it was a functioning farm up until 1965.
With 10-12 cows and 70-80 sheep and everything was done with horses.
There were no tractors used, ever.
So a typical wall like this, you start with the foundations.
Big stones that you dig in, partly.
And then you build it from there with a layer of turf, another layer of stone, alternating
layers of turf and stone and turf strips.
And then you compact the soil behind the stones and turf and then you just continue that way
until you're finished.
And if it's properly done with good materials, like in this case, then it's very sturdy.
This is gonna last for, we would say one generation, 30 years, 40 years.
You would reuse the stones, replace the turf and you either use turf chunks like this but
this is not used in this area.
Too rainy for that in the South of Iceland.
Here you cut turf strips and you use these tools for cutting the chunks.
You need sturdy and strong and sturdy tools like this for cutting the chunks.
And are you farming the turf or is it growing naturally here?
No, it comes from the wetland, not from the field.
This is useless.
It comes from out there in the wetland.
And then you have tools like this for cutting the strips and you're on your knee and you
cut like this.
And you have tools like this, so different type and shape for trimming the turf.
This also, it's kind of a scythe for cutting grass, cutting scythe, but still used for
cutting turf as well.
You would be cutting kind of diagonal cuts like this and then you are kind of trimming
it with knives like this.
See, a stone like this would be ideal.
Ideal for wall building.
You have a flat top, and then a flat face.
So it's very easy to build a house if you work with stones like this.
And then the lava has these holes, it's air bubbles in it.
So it's much lighter than it looks.
Oh okay, yeah they look pretty heavy.
Yeah, look heavy but they are light.
With small pieces like this, you are just trimming it, you are not shaping it.
You would be using it more or less as it is.
But you might be breaking off...perhaps if this is in the way, then you break it off.
But usually you would just look for the proper stone.
This is the turf.
It's cut in the wetland and it has extremely dense root material.
And then you have tools like this for trimming it if necessary.
So it's almost like meat...it's all roots.
This is the most efficient for compacting the turf like this and then you compact the
soil inside the walls and then with sticks like this.
Traditional turf houses and especially turf houses on farms were built in clusters so
you'll see there's many houses all linked together.
Only one of them is actually the living space where you'll find the beds.
And then in the other houses you would find things like a horse stable or a food processing
area and they did this to take advantage of insulation from shared walls.
The layout of the typical Icelandic turf farm is a cluster of houses.
It's a complex of many small houses for different functions.
But usually it's only one house which is the living quarter, living house, that everybody
would live in.
Everybody would stay in one house but then the other houses were for different functions.
The small house over there is a smithy.
The other house there is a barn and then stable behind.
A fish drying shed and different small houses for horses on this farm, a kitchen, pantry,
and workshop for making things.
And another house for keeping potatoes and a hen house and different things like that.
So altogether it would be about 20 houses on this farm, which was average.
And then when I was brought up here in the sixties, it was about 8 or 10 houses in the
cluster.
In the main cluster.
Inside the main home you can see that all of the beds were in one room and this was
where everyone did all of their work, where they slept, where they ate, where they gave
birth.
Everything in an Icelanders life happened in this main living space and it really was
communal living.
This is...this was called the blue room.
It was not used much.
Only for receiving guests and used in the summertime.
Then if you go further in, this was used for processing milk.
And then this room here, this was a typical kitchen.
These kitchens were in use well into the 20th Century for boiling things and smoking.
And the smoke from the open fire would be used for preserving food.
Preserving the meat and fish and other things.
And then baking bread, rye bread and flat bread and everything.
Everything was done on a fire like this in a separate room like this called hearth kitchen.
And then this was the way into the stables, which we have not been rebuilding yet.
I didn't realize they were all connected.
All connected with passages.
So you didn't have to go outside?
No.
You would go into the stable there which we are in the process of rebuilding now and then
from the stable into the barn.
So this room was in constant use, used every day.
This is the main room.
This is the main living room that was just about...well it would be the same type of
room, in the same proportions, same width, same height, everywhere in Iceland, on every
farm.
And this is the room that everybody would be living in.
The beds would be fixed along the walls, 2 people sleeping in each bed.
My great grandmother, which is over there, she had nine children in that bed over there
and then she died there when she was 94 or 95 years old.
In this house.
This room is where everything was done.
Children would be conceived as well in this room.
And then giving birth, and working, and eating, and sleeping, and then dying.
Everything was done in the same room.
And everybody would be sleeping and sharing the same space.
Only privacy basically would be your own bed and what you keep under the pillow or something
like that.
It was a kind of communal type of living.
And if there are people moving around and you have 5 or 6 people living in a space like
this then you heat it up with your body.
Each house is joined together with hallways so that people could go from one area of the
house to the other without having to go outside.
It's more economic to do it that way.
But the main reason is for insulation and saving heat.
Keeping the heat inside.
Also, in maintenance it's easier to have a small house.
You could rebuild one house, one small house in the cluster, without disturbing the others
rather than if you would have one big house.
Then it would be a major project to take down the big house and rebuild it.
But in a cluster of relatively small houses you would be able to rebuild each part
without tearing everything down.
And that is what was done in the old turf farms.
You would be repairing one house at a time.
In addition to having really thick walls made with the lava stones and the turf, the houses
are also dug and built into the back of a hill so that they're protected from the cold
Northerly winds.
If you look at these houses from the back, like from this angle, then we see that they
are dug into the hill.
They are dug into the hillside, not sitting on top of it, but dug into it, so the earth
is protecting it especially from the North wind, which is the cold strong wind in the
Winter and most of the year.
And so the main living house at the front is almost completely protected from the elements.
So this is a key factor when it comes to the old Icelandic turf houses.
They are dug into the land.
Hannes completely restored this old farmstead and while he continued to use the traditional
methods using the turf and the lava stones for the walls, he did use corrugated iron
for some of the front walls and some of the newer roofs.
This was practically the only shelter we had when we started rebuilding this because this
was all in ruins.
And was it you and your wife doing this?
Yes, and my mother.
She was born here and she was very enthusiastic about preserving the farm and so it was a
family project to start with.
And then my wife and I we kind of took it over.
My mother passed away a few years ago and then building the museum and all that we started
on that in 2006.
It's really incredible to see how cozy and liveable these small spaces are even though
they're built with such basic natural materials.
One of the reasons that Icelanders ended up using sod layers in their stone houses is
because they don't have any lime in the soil that would allow them to create cement so
that they could block the holes in between the stones, kind of like what you would see
in Scotland or Ireland.
There is no lime in Iceland.
It's too young for that.
So we have no natural or local cement for cementing the stones together.
And we have a very limited supply of wood.
There is hardly any local wood so it would either be imported.
It was always imported wood to Iceland on a small scale through the centuries, but most
of the wood used in these houses would be from driftwood and shipwrecks.
That would be the wood that we would be using.
And so it was a limited supply of wood that's one reason that turf and stone was used on
such an extensive scale.
Turf and stone was used in every house, everywhere in Iceland.
And no difference between classes.
The upper, so-called upper-class, priests or officials, they would also live in turf
houses and used turf and stone for the walls.
And then the poor people would also use the same materials so there was not a class difference
there because turf and stone was the local material and available almost everywhere in
Iceland.
And with proper use, like you see in these houses, it is very sturdy, and good material.
When it dries out, it becomes almost like a brick and gives a very good insulation.
And if it's properly done with kind of basic skill or basic knowledge of the craft then
it is very sturdy and beautiful at the same time.
I mean this is beautiful walls.
It blends right into the landscape.
Yes.
And what about dampness?
So would this hold a lot of damp if it was raining a lot?
Yes it would.
Dampness would have been a problem in these houses, always.
Especially before the corrugated iron.
But again, if it's properly made with a very thick layer of turf on the roof and the roof
would be steep, as you see.
These roofs are very steep.
And you see over there is a typical turf house.
It's a very steep roof and a very thick layer of turf.
It would have to rain for a long time before the water would penetrate all the way through.
So there was much less leakage in the houses than you might think.
I've been talking to a lot of...systematically talking to old people that lived in these
houses, which are disappearing now, very quickly, and very few of the people remember that these
houses were leaking.
It's relatively easy to heat these houses up.
You would use your body heat mostly for heating the houses.
Oh, they didn't have fires in them?
No, no they never had open fires in these houses in Iceland.
So just body heat would heat these houses?
Yes.
Originally it would be body heat and then in the latter part of the 19th Century and
beginning of the 20th Century they started installing stoves.
Wood burning or coal stoves.
Either they would extend the main living room as they would do in the South, and then have
the stove there and that would generate some heat.
I think it's not easy to say that I could do a better house, or a more beautiful house
if I would rebuild it.
I think it might be difficult.
I mean, should it be higher or lower or wider?
I think it's pretty good as it is.
Difficult to improve.
I would say it's worth preserving as it is.
And it blends almost completely into the site.
We didn't even see it where we first got here!
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