[Cob] recycled cob bricks

[Predrag Cvetkovic]

You are welcome Debora.
While speaking on most popular methods of building houses in the past here
in Serbia, I forgot to say that adobe bricks were very popular in the whole
country and you can find many houses in both towns and villages, built with
adobe and still in use now. But many, maybe most, people in Serbia probably
have never seen cob bricks.

On Wed, May 20, 2020 at 7:07 PM Predrag Cvetkovic <predragcv at gmail.com>
wrote:

> First to say: I miss discussions on this group so much and believe no
> other form of groups activity on the web can replace it.
>
> Just wanted to share pictures of a small house builded with recycled cob
> bricks, I took recently.
> It is near village Kaonik, on the road Krusevac - Ribarska Banja, central
> Serbia. (South-East Europe). Bricks have been taken from an old broken-down
> house from that village Kaonik. I don't like to guess how old that ruined
> house was, but think it must be 80 years and more, maybe even much more. It
> is amazing these bricks are in such good conditions.
>
> To build that new house, the owner asked help of one person that was
> familiar with that way of building (which is very rare in Serbia now).  The
> house has concrete foundation and walls have been build with these cob
> bricks using earth mortar. They used earth just near the house, I think
> earth was of good quality.
>
> I noticed that new house last year, it was about 100m from the road but I
> was sure from the first moment that it were cob bricks. It is very, very
> rare to see now in Serbia, except maybe in some parts on the south. In most
> parts of Serbia, old houses in villages were built as Wattle and daub, and
> in North Serbia rammed earth was prevailing.
>
> South of the Serbia was under longer influence of Turkish empire. It seems
> cob bricks were popular in old Turkey and probably one of prevailing
> methods for building houses (mostly because of their conditions, of
> course). Turkish name for cob bricks is "kerpitch", in Serbian we pronounce
> something like "cherpitch" where first "ch" is a very soft sound, written
> with a special word too.
>
> Here is a short quotation from an old book about that "lack of wood of any
> kind in this part of Turkey, all houses in both town and country are built
> of mud bricks called “kerpitch,” which is a mixture of mud and straw".
>
> I think that cob wasn't known here in Serbia, except through these cob
> bricks, and as I've already mentioned in south Serbia.
>
> I've made a special web page with these pictures and put on my beekeeping
> website without any other link except this external:
>
> http://www.pcela.rs/cob_bricks.html
>
> kind regards to all
> Predrag
>