kitchen

The long kitchen wall divides the house from next door and is a good few hundred years old. The great thing about this room though is the ceiling. It is like all but one other roof in the house being stone with a layer of earth above and topped by a sort of cement layer. In all it can be about a foot deep which means that it keeps the power of the sun at bay. Here in the kitchen the difference is that the stones, called "shorok", are about 7 foot long and rest on cantilevered stones at either end called "kilibs". There is one hell of a lot of weight up there and the room above was probably added in the 1940s or 1950s so during the Second World War this ceiling was the roof of this part of the house. It is no wonder that whoever owned the house at that most dangerous time therefore decided to put in a beam to hold up the stones should one of them crack, however the beam has no real function today as none of the stones touches it!

as it was

The beam supporting nothing but a few wires..

as it is

The preparation end of the kitchen..and below is a view of the eating and sitting end.