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The article regards the understanding of the notion "home / my home" in the present-day Latvia, mostly rural areas where folk traditions have been preserved. Apart from folklore as non-material value, wooden architecture is treated as a material value in the countryside. In the course of time, part of previously significant in economy and history of culture wooden buildings (threshing barn, cattle-shed, barn) have no direct use any more nowadays. These buildings either vanish from the rural environment or are rebuilt into garages or buildings with some other practical functions. People living in the countryside have preserved the notion of the symbolical worth of separate parts of wooden buildings (roof - windows - doors) and their surroundings (flower garden, fruit orchard, tended meadow). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latvian wooden house (in a broader context—wooden houses) so far have been examined mostly within the disciplines of history or ethnography. Only a few studies (in the 1920s and 1930s) may be referred to a house as an object of folklore and/or mythology. On the grounds of Latvian folklore material, as well as the field studies carried out by the author over a decade (2003-2013) in Latvian regions and Latvian diaspora in Russia (Siberia) and Belarus, the outer shell of a house (walls, roof, windows, door) and its mythical-magical functions in folk opinion have been analysed. The author has come to a conclusion that gradually the boundary between the binary polarisation “us and the other”, “to be protected—to be unprotected”, “our space—the other space”, “secured and open” that were so crucial in the folk tradition has been dismantled. The “skin” of the house, to a great extent, has lost its significant function of protection rooted in the tradition, preserving only the practical function—guarding from cold or heat, and partially the aesthetic function—which of the house owners have a more beautiful or unusual paintwork or the design elements of the external wall. At the same time, nowadays there is a tendency to return to the protection signs of the house (pentagrams, octograms, etc.), whose meaning is rooted in the ancient mythical and magical ideas about the isomorphism and periodic renewal of the house (microspace) and the world (macrospace). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]