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The indentured servants spent five nights away from home,
and estates built special houses for them to spend the night
and store their carts, tools and food. Clothes could be
dried when it was raining.
The house for indentured servants at the Turaida Estate
was built in the 18th century or even earlier. The house is
seen in a drawing produced by Wilhelm Krauze in 1792. It
is the only known clay building at the Turaida Estate.
From the outside, the house looked like a threshing barn.
The clay walls were covered with a four-sided roof with
wide eaves. A protuberance at the western end of the house
contained a large and heated room in which servants
slept. Court sessions were held there, and guilty farmers
were whipped. At the eastern end was a large shelter for
horses with a large roof supported on poles. The horses
and carts of the indentured servants were kept there, and
there was also space for tools. When indentured servitude
ended in the latter half of the 19th century, the building
was repurposed for various economic needs. After
agrarian reforms in the 1920s, the building became part
of the Ošas farm of the local forest ranger.
The Turaida Museum Reserve engaged in archaeological
excavations in 2002 and again 2011 to dig out the founda-
tions of the building. This made it possible to know the size
of the building’s foundations – 33.5 m long, 11.5 m wide
and 0.9 m thick. There were some 300 m2 of space in the
building.
The Turaida Parish Magazine
The Turaida Parish magazine is on a hillock along the
Turaida-Inciems road. Although it was not part of the
estate as such, it is an essential part of the local landscape.
Liberation of famers in 1819 led to the construction of
parish magazines in Vidzeme. The magazine was a
building in which grain reserves were kept for years of
poor harvests or other disasters. Each farm had to
contribute a certain amount of grain to the magazine.
Farmers could borrow seed grain or food grain when
needed, but they had to return that amount plus interest
to the magazine eventually.
The Turaida Parish magazine from the East, 2005
The Turaida Parish magazine during restoration, 2011
A boundary stone with the symbols of the Rīga arch-
bishop in the northern wall of the magazine building
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