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Bartın Houses, Daraba, Gulluk and Kuşluk

The houses of a city let anyone walking its streets read its daily life. In Bartın, that reading is done with a vocabulary of its own.

Radar TürkiyeRadar Türkiye6 Kasım 2026
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Bartın Houses, Daraba, Gulluk and Kuşluk

The houses of a city let anyone walking its streets read its daily life. In Bartın, that reading is done with a vocabulary of its own. Daraba, gulluk, kuşluk, dışar, içer and hergil are local terms that describe both the outside and the inside of Bartın houses. Drawing on the civil architecture information on the official pages of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, this article opens up that vocabulary and explains how to look at houses in Bartın.

Traces of the post-Tanzimat era

The page on historic Bartın houses by the Bartın Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism describes the city's houses as pictures that show examples of Ottoman civil architecture and summarize recent history. According to the page, the reforms applied after the proclamation of the Tanzimat Edict in 1839 also affected the urban fabric. The modernization process continued by reflecting western ideas in construction methods, plan layout, facade design and decoration. This is the first frame to keep in mind when looking at the houses of Bartın: what stands before you are civil traces of a period of transformation.

The same source says the houses reflect the arts of Art Nouveau and Baroque. As you walk, be content with a general impression and pay attention to the facade decoration, the window surrounds and the moldings.

The daraba and the garden

To understand the outer look of Bartın houses, begin with the garden. According to the sources, the houses are generally two storeys and stand within a garden surrounded by wooden fences called daraba. The daraba, the wooden fence, draws a soft boundary between house and street and lets you read the house together with its garden rather than behind a closed wall. The text on the Culture Portal gives the same information.

There is one more detail to notice in the garden. The source says that every garden has a well built of stone. It is not certain that every garden still has its well today; changes may have occurred over time. Even so, the well reminds us that house and garden were conceived as a whole. If you take photographs, do so from outside the fence, respecting the privacy of those inside.

Where stone meets timber

On building materials the pages are clear: the upper floors are timber frame and the ground floors are stone. The house is thus made of a combination of two materials. Because the lower floor is stone, it sits firmly on the ground, while the upper floor carries the lightness of wood. As you walk, read the lower and upper floors separately. Look at the transition between the texture of the stone part and the lines of the timber part. This transition is often the most telling place of the house.

Slate stone and the gulluk

The gulluk is one of the most distinctive words of Bartın houses. According to the sources, gulluk is the name given to the entrance section. Both the entrance section and the walking areas in the gardens are paved with slate stone. Houses are entered through a double-leaf door, by way of the gulluk. This section is also an intermediate space that provides access to the upper floors. In other words, the gulluk is the threshold between street and house, and it means more than a corridor: it is a transition area between inside and outside and the beginning of the way up.

As a visitor you will mostly not be able to enter a gulluk, because these houses are dwellings. But if you get the chance to see this section in a building opened as an exhibition or museum, pay attention to the slate paving and the form of the door. The sources also say that a hergil cupboard is found in the gulluk or the kitchen; this shows that the section is not only a passage but also a place of use.

Windows and the kuşluk

The easiest way to read a facade is through its windows. According to the sources, traditional houses have as many windows as possible. The windows are original sash windows; only those lighting the staircases and bay windows are round in form. This distinction is a clue you can notice even from the street. When you see a round window, you may think there is a staircase or a bay behind it; still, do not assume that this rule applies exactly in every house.

The moldings between the windows, called kuşluk, wrap around the whole building. The kuşluk divides the facade with horizontal lines and visually ties the floors together. The sources also stress that windows, staircases and ceilings are decorative elements. So the decoration continues not only on the facade but also inside the house.

Dışar and içer

The interiors form the most important part of Bartın houses. Houses are made up of rooms arranged around a sofa, the central hall. The hall is called dışar and the rooms are called içer. This naming summarizes the interior order of the house very simply: a shared space in the middle and private rooms around it. These words are valuable because they show how the Bartın dialect divided the house.

In the rooms, built-in elements made according to function are found: the yük cupboard, the hamam and the hearth. In the gulluk or the kitchen there is the hergil cupboard. The source states clearly that houses with the hearth rooms called hum içer have not survived to our day. This sentence reminds us that architectural heritage is not permanent: some features of the houses described survive today only in written sources. For this reason, details about the interiors should be read not as the present state of the houses but as a description of the traditional layout.

The vocabulary at a glance

Before setting out on your walk, you can keep this short glossary in mind.

  • Daraba is the wooden fence surrounding the garden of a house.
  • Gulluk is the entrance section paved with slate and the intermediate space leading to the upper floors.
  • Kuşluk is the molding between windows that wraps around the building.
  • Dışar is the central hall around which the rooms are arranged.
  • İçer are the rooms around the hall.
  • Hergil cupboard is the built-in cupboard found in the gulluk or the kitchen.

Knowing these six words makes it easier to name what you see in a street and to compare it with the description in the sources.

Where and how to look today

If you are looking for an indoor place to see houses up close, the museums page of the Bartın Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism offers a clue. According to the page, the historic timber house where one of Bartın's former mayors was born and lived now serves as an ethnography museum. Besides the owner's belongings, the museum holds about 700 ethnographic objects donated by Bartın families. The page calls the building a fine example of the traditional timber houses of Bartın and notes that many visitors tour it. Check visiting days and hours from current official sources.

The building of the Bartın City Museum is another example of civil architecture. According to the Ministry of National Education's out-of-school learning page, it was built in 1885 as a primary and secondary school, converted into a high school in 1921, then used as a primary school, and served as the municipal service building between 1953 and 2008. The museum opened to visitors on 27 January 2018. The directorate's page lists among the museum's main headings the architecture of Bartın, home life and food culture. It is therefore useful to combine what you see in the street with the account in the museum. Before visiting, check the working days on the Ministry page; it also says the museum is closed on Mondays.

Suggestions for your walk

Try the following order. First stand at the head of a street and look at the general silhouette of the houses; two-storey buildings, fenced gardens and regular rows of windows will catch your eye. Then approach the facade of a single house and look at the transition between the stone of the ground floor and the timber frame above. Third, count the shapes of the windows: among the rectangular sash windows, are there round ones? Finally, follow the horizontal moldings we call kuşluk and see how they wrap the facade.

As for the season, the green of the wooden fences and gardens is more visible in spring and summer, while the texture of the wood stands out more clearly in dry, bright weather. This is general observation advice; the sources record nothing about seasons. When taking photographs, stay outside the fences, do not photograph doors and windows at close range, and do not disturb those who live in the houses.

A house of memory

Bartın houses are not merely old buildings; they carry the city's transformation after the Tanzimat, its choice of materials and its way of living. The garden behind the daraba fence, the slate-paved gulluk, the facade wrapped by the kuşluk and the içer rooms arranged around the dışar are parts of the same whole. Once you learn these words and set out on a walk, the streets become a reading ground for you. Do not expect every detail described in the official sources to be found in every house today; but knowing the words will help you understand each house you see more deeply.

Sources

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