Burdei

[3] The experiments of the Archeological Open-Air Museum in Březno near Louny have reconstructed the living and temperature conditions in the dug houses.

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.

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.

[3][5]In countries like Romania or Ukraine, the burdei was built to constitute a permanent housing place and could accommodate a whole family.

[7] Mennonites 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: ...is the quaint brand-new village of Gnadenau, where there are some twenty small farmers, who have built the queerest and most comfortable cheap houses ever seen in the West, and with the least amount of timber, being merely a skeleton roof built on the ground and thatched with prairie-grass.