Terem (Russian терем) was its own wards where nobility women lived in isolation in the mansion and castle of the Russian aristocracy. It is uncertain where and when the practice arose, but terem was used in the Great Commune of Moscow in the 16th and 17th centuries, until some time until 1718 when Peter the Great forbade them. Directly translated means the word “tower”, and the women’s homes, also referred to as “tall terem”, were often found in the tower or high-ceilinged top floors.
Terem is also used as a term when historians discuss and discuss segregation of Russian nobility as an institution. This phenomenon reached its peak towards the late 1600s.
Restrictions for royal and noble women not only included isolation in their own apartments. They also had no opportunity to interact with men outside of their close family, and if they left the room they were dressed in high necked, long-sleeved, worn clothes, and were often veiled. When they were traveling, they were hidden from the outside world in closed wagons.
Women had little formal significance in society, but the power of the nobility was still significant because they chose spouses for their children from their terem, thus providing for alliances between powerful families.
Etymology and use
The researchers agree that the word terem comes from the Byzantine-Greek teremnon (Greek: τέρεμνον), which means “chamber” or “residence”. In dictionaries, terem is translated with «tower» or «tower room». The women’s apartment, which was often on the top floor, was also referred to as “the high terem”.
The word terem is not linguistically related to the Arab harem, so foreigners who visited the Grand Authority wrongly assumed. The 19th century Russian historians also believed that there was a connection between harem and terem, as they believed the use of terem came from the Islamic custom with its own wards for women in a home.
Old Russian sources often used the word pokoi, but the 19th century historians preferred terem, as in the story and fairy tales the word for the room where the lonely heroine waited and waited for her warrior. Terem eventually became synonymous with the practice of isolating the upper class women.
The Terempalasset in Moscow, built in the 17th century, contained its own departments for the women, but has never been exclusively inhabited by women.
Terem is used occasionally about mansions and villas built much later than the 18th century.
Female residence
In the 16th and 17th century it was common practice among royalty and in Bojar -Families in Muscovy that the women lived isolated in their terem.
The teremet was a sheltered apartment within the mansion or castle itself, most often in a lofty ceiling, with steep, high ceilings. It could also be a separate wing or a separate building. All contact with men outside of the family was forbidden for the women. If the terem was in a separate building, it could only be connected to the men’s apartment through an outdoor covered passage. In the tsar’s palace, the women’s apartments were especially beautifully decorated and were fitted with a private enclosed courtyard.
As political roles and status within the nobility were inherited, it was important to have descendants, and the bojark women gave birth to many children. The women in the tsar’s Kremlin appear to have been pregnant around every 18 months, but child mortality was high, so they were not yet guaranteed descendants who grew up.
In order for women to be able to carry on ever new pregnancies, they had breastfeeding that took care of the children from newborns. The teremet had its own rooms for the children, dining room, room for a number of maids, nanny and court ladies, in addition to the nursery. Even in the late 1600s, when the rooms in a home became more specialized, separate departments for women and men were maintained in the upper class home. The Tsar had his bedroom in the women’s part of the palace.
Daughters were born and raised within the walls of the terraces, where they were isolated, in accordance with the orthodox teachings that they should be sexually untouched until they got married. They were taught by their mothers and other female relatives in the necessary virtues and duties of a wife, and spent most of the day praying and working. Aside from short walks, women did not leave the terem before marriage except when they were allowed to receive guests or leave their rooms to manage the household. When they got married, they moved into the room in the man’s palace. Guttebarn was taken from the mother’s custody at the age of seven, and was educated and trained by homeschoolers and her male family members.
Architecture and hierarchy
Like most other buildings in the 16th century Moscow, the palaces were built of wood. It was also fired, and large fires often occurred. According to historian Natalia Pushkareva, therefore, none of the original palaces have been preserved from this time. Russian museums and rebuilt palaces, however, show how to think the buys lived and lived. The most magnificent example is the Kolomenskojepalasset, Aleksej Ice Summer Palace, with 270 rooms. The original palace, as of the Moscovites and visitor foreigners, was called “The World’s Eighth Wonders”, overdue, and was ordered torn by Katarina II in 1768.
The drawings of the plant still existed, and a model of wood showed how the palace had looked, so in 2010 a rebuilt palace could open to the public. Although the Kolomenskoj Palace was a “miracle”, it should have been quite similar to the buoy palaces from the same time when it came to organizing rooms and buildings. The Bojar palaces also consisted of many different building bodies, which together formed a diverse and picturesque building complex. Column shoes can thus serve as an example of palace architecture.
The palaces were divided into a lower floor with secondary rooms, a high first floor, several floors with a living room, and a loft. The roof shapes and outer walls were dressed and decorated in accordance with the palace hierarchy. The timber walls of the tsarens apartment were externally dressed with trespon, with lavish carvings over the windows. The roofs of this part of the palace were the most varied, with shapes similar to monkeys, barrels, cubes, tents; all packed with trespon. The facades of the tsar’s wife, the tsarina, and the tsarevitsen’s apartment had the same design as the tsar’s department, but with simpler ornaments, tiles and roof shapes. The outer walls of the tsarevnaenesTerem was without cladding on the wood, the window frames had hardly any decorations, and the windows were smaller than in the rest of the palace, so the princes could not be seen from the outside. The roofs were simple and pointed with four sides, like a steep pyramid. A tall tower above the tsare’s part of the buildings dominated the entire plant.
Political and social institution
The women in the Greater Moscow state are not educated in reading and writing, not because the custom is such; by nature they are simple and dull and cloudy in contact with others because they live in secret rooms in their father’s homes from the small ones until they get married and no outsiders except the closest relatives can visit them and they can nor visit others. Quotation
– Grigorij Kotosjikhin (around 1660)
Before the 1980s, there was little research on why mosquitek women were isolated in their own homes. Historian Nancy S. Kollmann writes that historians had until then accepted Kotoshikin’s statement from the 17th century that women were isolated because they were single. It seems that historians rejected the terem scheme as another example of the barbaric social customs of the Mosques.
Later, researchers found that the institution’s primary function was political, as it was intended to protect a woman’s value in the marital market.
Terem isolated women both from members of the opposite sex and the general public. Throughout the period the scheme was practiced, aristocratic women and men were referred to separate spheres in society. Upper-class women were completely subordinate to their men, and could neither hold public positions nor serve, nor have power in any other way. The Tsarins were also not crowned with their men. The first female co-ruler was Katarina I from 1724.
In some areas, women in the Middle Ages, Tsar-Russia had an advantage over their European fellow citizens, because they could own, sell and buy real estate, and dispose of their own tax.
Arranged marriage
The mothers had great authority when it came to marrying. They had an influence on the choice of spouses for both sons and daughters, and it was also the mothers who interviewed and assessed potential candidates. In this way, women had to some extent both economic and political influence. This has meant that some historians have questioned whether they were really politically oppressed during the “terem period”.
The mothers of both sides was behind the arranged marriage between Ivan IV and Anastasia Romanovna in 1547. It was this that led to the Romanov – dynasty came to power.
Tsarina also had an important task in receiving and deciding various applications. Most applications applied for marriages.
Relationship for village women and peasant women
There is no evidence that the terem scheme existed outside the nobility. Other families had neither the economy nor the political interest in implementing it. Women in villages and farms had to work largely and share the financial responsibility with the men. This led to these women having greater freedom of movement in the community than women from the upper class.
In art and folk culture
The Terem motif has been used by both visual artists and writers.
Katarina the Great wrote several plays and librettos for performances performed in her newly built theater. She herself was a powerful woman who broke old rules, led wars and was referred to as a libertine, but on the stage she still lets the heroine represent a traditional morality; they spend their lives in the world without showing any outreach. Critics and historians have wondered about this. One interpretation is that Catherine was tired after demanding decades as ruler, and she thought with nostalgia of what life in a secluded terem would have been. The terem could also be a symbol of what was secret, hidden and veiled, and open to more interpretations.
In the opera Boris Godunov of Modest Musorgsky, built on Aleksandr Pushkin’s drama, the first act takes place in Tsarina’s terem.
In stories and adventures, the heroine often sits in her terem and waits. One story tells about the Tsar’s lonely daughter who “sits behind three times you lock, she sits behind three times nine keys, where the wind never blows, the sun never shines, and young heroes never see her.”
In popular songs there are also allusions to the isolation of women. A wedding song deals with the symbolic action when the chaste youngster escapes the isolation of the terrestrial: “From the terem, from the terem, from the high beautiful terem, the beautiful, tall, luminous; From her mother’s care, the beautiful virgin has come out, she has hurried out, the sweet beautiful virgin Avdotjusjka. ”
Origin and History
The researchers do not agree when and how the scheme of terem occurred. Due to the lack of sources from the Moscow main business district, it is particularly difficult to determine the cultural origin and when it became a common part of the upper class lifestyles.
Chronological origin
Historians in the 1800s and early 1900s had a theory that terem was taken over from Mongolian women’s oppressive system after the Russian lighthouses were stalled during the Golden Horde of the 13th century.
The earliest known written source with references to terem is Siegmund von Herberstein’s report from 1557, but it is uncertain how long the scheme had been practiced when he described it. Based on Herberstein’s report, historians have postulated that there was a radical change in women’s status during Ivan III (1440-1505), although it is unlikely that such a dramatic social change was carried out so quickly.
Recent historians, like Kollmann, believe the end of the 1400’s is more likely to be the beginning of isolation of women in the great government. This theory is confirmed by the fact that the grandfather Sofia of Lithuania and Sofia Palaiologina received foreign messengers in 1476 and 1490 respectively. A aristocracy with strict separation of the sexes, as later practiced in the great government, would not have allowed women to participate in politics in this way. According to Pushkareva, in the 13th century, women had been actively engaged in state-of-the-art work, received ambassadors, diplomatic messengers, disseminated knowledge and the work of doctors.
Based on how women are mentioned in written sources from the 14th to the 17th centuries, Kollmann believes that terem has evolved over a long period of time, while Pushkareva claims it may have been a relatively short-lived practice, which barely existed before the Great Uprising (1598 -1613).
Cultural origin
Isolation of women in their own homes was not uncommon in the Middle Ages; Noble women in France also lived like this. In the 20th century, women in some countries, for example in the Middle East, still lived in separate apartments within a larger housing unit.
There have been drawn parallels between Terem and the Sasiatic practice of isolating women, Purdah, but there is no evidence that terem is developed from Asian cultures.
There is disagreement about whether the institution was a custom derived from other cultures or whether it was unique to the Moscow Grand Prix. Earlier historians’ theory that the practice of isolating women was borrowed from the mongolian erorbrands in the 13th century, is now obsolete. The assumption is impossible, according to Charles Halperin, as the Mongols never practiced such a scheme. The reality was that the women in the Borjigin dynasty, and the khan’s wives and widows, had relatively large political power and social freedom.
An alternative theory is that the practice came from the Byzantine Empire. Although Byzantine women did not live separate from men after the 11th century, it was still viewed as an ideal. This ideal may have seemed appealing to Russian clergy, as these were already heavily influenced by the Orthodox teachings about gender and women’s roles. Orthodox belief that women were unclean at certain periods, after childbirths and during menstruation, may have been used to justify isolation of women.
Although the exact origin of the practice with terem is uncertain, most historians believe that terem was a regime that arose in the Moscow Grand Duchy, most likely developed as a response to political changes that occurred in the 16th century.
Other societies and cultures may have provided models, but it was the upper class’s own needs in the tsar’s Russia that propelled the scheme. Historian Hamilton Gibb claims that every culture only borrows what they need and that is compatible with their own culture.
History and Development
16th and 16th century
The first simultaneous reports from foreign travelers who experienced and described the terem as an institution were written in the 16th century. In addition to Herberstein’s book, Adam Olearius ‘s travel reports are available.
Although missing sources make the comparison with previous centuries difficult, historians generally agree that the practice of terem reached its peak in the 17th century, during the Romanov dynasty.
For the tsar’s family, the practice with terem was relatively short-lived. Towards the end of the 17th century, the restrictions imposed on the female family members were relieved. Strict rules for other aristocratic women became more relaxed after tsar Aleksej, the first married to his second wife, Natalja Narysjkina, in 1671. Natalja was quick to remove the custom of driving in a closed wagon, something which led to scandal.
When Aleksej died, he left six daughters from first marriage. Most of these began to show themselves publicly and dress more in line with European fashion. Around 1680, other nobility women also began to appear publicly without being veiled, and women eventually played a greater role in public and social contexts.
Aleksey’s daughter, Sofia Aleksejevna, who ruled from 1682 to 1689, had limited power, but could participate in government activities and received ambassadors. She spent much of her time in her terem, where she was entertained by, among other things, nobility women who played theater for her. Sofia was expelled to the monastery in his last years, following political conflicts.
Peter the Great and Prohibition of Terem
The practice of terem was difficult to completely remove in several areas of the country, as it was the honor and reputation of wives and daughters at stake. As late as 1713, foreign visitors observed that the aristocratic Russian women lived “extremely retrenched”.
In 1718, the isolation of aristocratic women in Terem was officially forbidden. Peter the Great gave orders that women should participate in social life at the new, western-inspired court in St. Petersburg. During this period, Peter tried to change the nobility of a class of inherited titles, to one where the individual’s status was based on the efforts they had made in the state apparatus. Peter’s ban on Terem was only part of the plan to break down the “policy of clarity” in the realm, creating a service model modeled on the one that existed in the West.
The urgent inclusion of women in the court’s social activities was met with resistance from several teams. Not all women were happy to attend the court meetings Peter organized. Documents show that for many years only in St. Petersburg women participated in court life.
Many women were also unwilling to start with a new style of clothing, which was radically different from traditional long-sleeved and long-necked long-sleeved costumes, but on Peters’s command, the women of the Tsar family began dressing for Western fashion, with rings, corsets and aftermaths life.
The abolition of terem greatly enhanced the status of the nobility women, both socially and in terms of rights. The ban came just after a decree from the Tsar who allowed women to inherit their husbands lands. Women were legally entitled to comment on the choice of husbands, and more and more upper-class women received education. The training was only conducted privately, depending on the family’s attitude and opportunities, but under Katarina the great took over the responsibility for education of women.
The credibility of foreign sources
There are written sources written while the terem practice still existed. Many of these documents are written by foreign travelers, which makes more researchers skeptical about their value. They claim that the reports may have been written to fulfill European stereotypes of “an underdeveloped Russian society.” These accusations have come against the travel descriptions of Olearius, Herberstein and Kotoshikin.
Source from Wikipedia