Chicken Legs Hut

Alongside the recently appeared drawings of The Flying Hut (see earlier blog entries below) - etched into wet concrete - there is a piece of graffiti that has intrigued and puzzled me for some time. It appears to be written in the same 'hand' as the drawings, or at least at the same time, but is quite difficult to interpret. The first words are simple enough 'LONG LIVE..' But the final words were barely legible. Now, with some help, the whole graffiti has been interpreted - and sheds an interesting new light on the history and origin of The Hut. It reads 'LONG LIVE BABA YAGA'.

Baba Yaga is a common figure in Slavic and Russian folklore. She appears as a wild old woman or witch, who flies in a mortar using a pestle to steer. Crucially, in relation to The Flying Hut, BABA YAGA LIVES IN A CABIN ON DANCING CHICKEN LEGS. She flies in and out of the cabin on her mortar - entering through the chimney, as it has no windows or door. This folktale may relate to a popular construction method of Siberian peoples for the purpose of preserving supplies from animals - a cabin without windows or doors is built on the stumps of two or three trees - which look very like chicken legs. There is also evidence, discovered by the archaeologists Yefimenko and Tretyakov in 1948, that the ancient Slavs used huts of a similar construction in their funeral traditions – traces of corpse cremation has been found inside such huts. The drawing by Nicholas Roerich, c.1905, is of a ‘Hut of Death’, and clearly shows the resemblance of the tree-stump supports to chicken legs.

So, it appears that The Flying Hut is alternatively known as Baba Yaga’s cabin – and indeed there are some Flickr pages recently brought to my attention that refer to The Hut in its Baba Yaga guise

http://flickr.com/photos/albedo/267111527/

And under the pseudonym ‘House On Stilts’ there are images of the drawings in still wet concrete – perhaps we have found the originators of both the drawings and the Baba Yaga cult?
http://www.flickr.com/groups/396081@N24/