Vainakh tower architecture
The oldest remains of buildings with the characteristics of Nakh towers date from the 1st century AD, and can already be distinguished into residential and military types.
Typical Vainakh towers were built on a square base, ranging from 6 to 12 m wide and 10 to 25 m high, depending on the function.
sparingly decorated with religious or good-wishing petrographs, such as solar signs, depictions of the author’s hands, or animals.
Songs and folk tales emphasize the role of the "master builder", who, according to tradition, would direct a group of assistants who did the actual work.
Some of these masters had their names preserved—such as Diskhi, associated in the local tradition to the military tower of Vougi, and Yand of the Ingush settlement Erzi.
Legends ascribe to the master builder the honourable and extremely dangerous task of erecting the tsIurku stone that topped the step pyramidal roof of a military tower.
One of the master builder's most critical tasks was to estimate the proper amount of mortar to ensure the seismic resistance of the tower.
Residential towers were family dwellings, which have been compared to structures seen in prehistoric mountain settlements dating back to 8000 BC.
The classic residential tower is a massive building, two to four stories high, with tapering walls and a flat shale roof.
Besides its structural function, the central pillar (erd-bogIam) had symbolic and religious significance in Vainakh culture, since ancient times.
A majority of the military ("combat") towers in the Ingush and Chechen mountains functioned both as watchtowers and as signalling beacons.
Some served as fortified guard posts, or as safe shelters for one or two families, which lived in nearby residential towers, against raids.
Chechen and Ingush military towers are fairly similar, differing only in size and the construction time.
Watchtowers were often built in strategic locations to control key bridges, roads and mountain passes.
The ground floor ceiling of the later, 15th–17th century towers was a false vault, known as nartol tkhov, with two intercrossing rows of reinforcing ribs.
Special attention was paid to the dressing and finishing of the keystones at the top of doors and windows, called kurtulg ("proud stone").
Tower defenders had only a small stock of food and extremely limited arsenals, be it arrows, stone missiles or powder and shot in later times.
The result were buildings that combined the functions of residential and defensive towers; they were smaller in size than the former, but a bit wider than the latter.
