Slender pine trees bow and hum loudly upon seeing her. She looks like one of them – her outfit is a reflection of the forest: she wears a robe the colour of a pine trunk tied with a green-needle belt and wears a tiara of pinecones on her head. The locals call this kind old lady Forest Auntie. According to local demonology, she is the good spirit of the forest. She transforms those who destroy trees into junipers and shelters stray visitors in her wooden mansion.
For centuries, the Tuchola Forests provided raw material for the construction of houses in Pomerania. Thick, inexpensive and easy to process, pine wood made it possible to erect buildings that were durable and resistant to moisture, microbes and insects. Until the second half of the 19th century, Kashubia – especially southern and central Kashubia – and Kociewie were dotted with wooden cottages of a compact form, with gabled roofs, often with arcades characteristic of the region. The locals used to call them ‘showrooms’ as various equipment and tools were displayed there. The landscape was dominated by cottages with a log frame structure whose beams were put together like a jigsaw puzzle – their ends were hewn to form a fishtail (isosceles trapezoid pieces were arranged to form a right angle). Small windows prevented heat loss. Kazimierz Karasiewicz, a medical doctor, traveller and author of the first guidebook to the Tuchola Forests from the early 20th century, wrote:
In earlier times, large pine trunks were taken for the construction of wooden houses, which were hewn on the surface with an axe, notched at the ends and stacked one trunk on top of the other (they are called log houses). The gaps between one trunk and the other were sealed with clay or moss. In more recent times, when timber became more expensive, the trunks were sawn in two, and the halves were used to build cheaper but thinner walls. […] Iron was not used at all for these buildings; even nails and door handles were made of wood.
When you are inside a Borowiak cottage, you can feel as if you’re in the forest: pine walls whitewashed with lime, floorboards (called déls), baskets, chairs and even waterproof jugs woven from juniper, spruce and pine roots. As a rule, the interior was a single room (a version for the poorer), with several nooks serving as kitchens and larders. The minor gentry could afford more rooms, and their houses were called manors. In addition to the residential cottage, the farmstead included a barn and other outbuildings constructed of coniferous trees from the surrounding forests.
Although brick construction began to be popularised in the mid-19th century, traditional wooden architecture accounted for 15% to 40% of all buildings in Kashubia until the 1960s. Today, few villages in and around the Tuchola Forests can be considered heritage sites (e.g. houses in the villages of Kasparus, Krąg or the church in Leśno – one of the best-preserved wooden churches in the Kashubian region). It is much easier to find attractive tourist offers of wooden holiday cottages that have little in common with a Borowiak cottage.