page_title: Itelmens
section_title: Itelmen houses
hierarchical_section_title: Itelmens / Pre-conquest Itelmen society / Itelmen houses
caption_attribution_description: English: Itelmen (Kamchadal) winter dwelling - dugout. Čeština: Itelmenská (Kamčadalská) zemnice - tradiční zimní obydlí.
context_page_description: The Itelmens are an ethnic group native to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. The Itelmen language is distantly related to Chukchi and Koryak, forming the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family, but it is now virtually extinct, the vast majority of ethnic Itelmens being native speakers of Russian. A. P. Volodin has published a grammar of the Itelmen language.
  Native peoples of Kamchatka, collectively referred to as Kamchadals, had a substantial hunter-gatherer and fishing society with up to fifty thousand natives inhabiting the peninsula before they were decimated by the Cossack conquest in the 18th century. So much intermarriage took place between the natives and the Cossacks that Kamchadal now refers to the majority mixed population, while the term Itelmens became reserved for persistent speakers of the Itelmen language. By 1993, there were less than 100 elderly speakers of the language left, but some 2,400 people considered themselves ethnic Itelmen in the 1989 census. By 2002, this number had risen to 3,180, and there are attempts at reviving the language. According to the 2010 census, there were 3,193 Itelmen in Russia.
context_section_description: Itelmen lived in different houses during the summer and winter seasons. The winter house, which was inhabited beginning in November, was dug into the soil 3–5 ft (0.91–1.52 m) in the shape of a rectangle. The walls were then covered with sticks and straw to prevent moisture from penetrating the interior. Four beams at the center of the dwelling supported the roof of the house, upon which rafters were laid, connecting the top of the yurt to the earthen walls. Atop the wooden rafters, approximately a foot of straw was laid, on top of which the excavated dirt was placed and stamped down. An opening atop the yurt, off to one side of the four posts and supported by the two beams, served as a smoke hole and an entrance. Opposite the fireplace, they made a passageway to the outside facing the river, which was left open only when fires were lit. Different sleeping quarters were demarcated by pieces of wood on which straw mats and reindeer or seal skins were used as bedding.
  In the summer months, the Itelmen live in raised houses called pehm or pehmy. As the ground thaws in the summer, the floors of the winter houses began to flood. In the summer months, each family in the village lived in their own house, rather than sharing a large house as in winter. These raised homes, or balagans as the Cossacks called them, were pyramids on raised platforms, with a door on the south and the north side. The extreme moisture of the climate required the raising of the homes for dry storage. Most villages, in addition to summer and winter houses, contained straw huts built on the ground, which were used for cooking dog food, boiling salt from sea water and rendering fat. Villages were surrounded by an earthen wall or palisades until the arrival of the Russians, after which this practice was banned.
caption: Itelmen and their winter dwelling, 1774
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