The Backstuga: Survival in Sweden’s Forests

Hidden deep in the forests of southern Småland, Sweden, are backstugas – small “hill cottages” built by the poorest people during the 17th and 18th centuries. With three wooden walls and a hillside forming the fourth, these sod-roofed dwellings offered warmth and concealment. Though often just a single room, they provided vital refuge in a harsh environment. Today, they stand as quiet witnesses to a past shaped by necessity and resilience.

A backstuga (literally “slope cottage” or “freeground cottage”) is a Swedish language judicial term, previously used in Finland and Sweden, for a kind of rural cottage.

The basic criterion is that the small building on someone else’s property, often public land, is a finite right that cannot be sold. Unlike pure squatter slums, there was usually some form of legal contract on a backstuga. A small piece of land, suitable for, for example, a potato field, often belonged to the backstuga.

The term has been known since the beginning of the 17th century, but it was only from the beginning of the 19th century that backstugusittare were reported separately from crofters. The estate statistics of 1805 say just over 28 000 backstugor, while in the middle of the 19th century 45 000, and in 1885 50 000 are reported and 1910 down to 22 658.

Additionally, in architecture, a backstuga is a cottage built into the southern slope of a hill, alternatively with a low floor and its walls stretched halfway down into the ground. Such cottages are also referred to as jordstuga (earth cottage) or stenstuga (stone cottage). They were small, typically about 20 square metres (220 sq ft), and only exceptionally found further north than Gothenburg. In the 20th century, the general poverty was mitigated and this kind of homes became less and less used. They were very close in design to Anglo-Saxon Pit-houses.

Backstugas were often inhabited by old, decrepit people and could, for example, be assigned to exceptions contracts, retired faithful servants, or the parish's poor boys instead of for the poorhouse. Exceptions contract is a contractual right for the seller to retain for the remainder of his life the usufruct of a small residence or a small area of land that is exempt from the buyer’s right to dispose of the transferred agricultural property.