Traditional Housing in the Image of the Gagauz World

In the article an attempt was made to analyze the symbolic meaning of the traditional home of the Gagauz people, which has reached us in a transformed form. Fragments of the realization of the symbolic image of separate parts of the house (walls, roof, oven, doors, threshold, windows, chimney were presented in the image of the Gagauz world. The semiotics of these significant parts of the home is related to their boundary function. According to popular beliefs, the boundary of the house is designed for isolation and protecting its inhabitants from the outside world. Being at the boundary between the external world (“foreign”) and internal (“his”), doors, thresholds and windows become carriers of protective functions, representing the boundary between worlds, the connection and separation of spaces, as well as the connection between them. The symbolic meaning of the house and its parts are revealed in the daily life of the Gagauz people, in calendar and family customs and rituals. The article is written in the ethnolinguistic key, the semiotic analysis of the elements of the house was carried out on the basis of family and calendrical customs and rituals, popular beliefs, folklore and mythological texts, recorded by the author and available in the Gagauz ethnographic literature, as well as based on cultural terminology on this topic.