Abstract:
Based on archival documents, containing ethnographic materials collected by ethnographers at the end of the 1940s and in the 1950s, we elucidate the transformations in rural housing in the Moldovan SSR. As a result of the research, we conclude that the transformations of localities and dwellings were promoted by the administrations at the local and central level, as elements of the socialist transformation of society and of raising the standard of living. Sovietization was considered the equivalent of modernization and improvement of living conditions. The rural communities, as a whole, and the houses, the households in the villages have undergone transformations tending to borrow urban elements promoted as being modernizing. Nowadays, most of the houses, considered traditional, are actually built in the 50s and 60s, and only a few of them have an authentic character from the interwar years, or of the immediate postwar years.
