Revenki's photos

Waiting for the next bundle.

A beehive of activity.

While grass was being added to the roof, work continued on braiding ever more vithior . I'm not sure, but I think the guy in the black shirt was also a visitor like me...but apparently without the right "connections" to get onto the roof himself.

After raising a bundle of grass, the rope had to be removed quickly and returned to the work platform for the next bundle. We would then spread the grass out evenly under our feet, orienting some of it to lie orthogonal to the pole structure underneath (in effect crosslinking or "felting" the grass together into one giant mat). The goal was to pile up the grass so that it was about two feet thick on the poles, the surface leaning slightly inward towards the structure, and then compact it with our feet by walking back and forth over it while waiting for the next bundle. Vidjor (seen stacked in loops on the poles behind the man in the plaid shirt) would periodically be threaded around the poles and buried in the grass to "stitch" the mat to the roof, and after every foot or so of grass added to the work level, we would paddle the outer edge to compact what our feet couldn't reach and to level out any high spots in the surface.

Paddling the loose åg at one end of the roof. Notice that the planks on the intersecting side building have been freshly tarred where the grass roof will later cover them.

A bundle of åg is slid up the chute from one of the platforms to the work level.

One of the tractors starts dumping åg on the platform.

Hans' nephew Bruce, now on the work platform below us, has his job explained to him.

I made it up to the roof, but then had no idea what to do. As you can probably guess from his expression, the Man in the Yellow Pants was about to make sure I learned to do it, and the right way. Of course, he didn't speak English, so everything he yelled at me had to be translated by Hans, to my right.

The man in the blue shirt is my host's father, a Gotland native who has been involved in tåckartings since the practice was revived in the 1950s. It's thanks to him that I was allowed onto the roof myself. The man with the yellow workpants is the grandson of the man who led the revival of grass roofs on Gotland in the 1950s. He was something of a foreman for our area of the roof, yelling instructions and periodically checking our work.

Everyone getting into their places. And in case you're wondering, yes, those scaffolds are every bit as flimsy and dangerous as they look. My (American) host remarked that OSHA would shut the project down in an instant if one tried to do it this way in the U.S..

The work level, showing the structure poles, extra vithior , and the middle chute. I didn't know it when I took this picture, but I would end up spending most of the next seven hours or so right there.

Everything in place and ready to go.

Everything in place and ready to go.

I gathered that working on the roof was the task of men, and braiding vidjor was the task for women. While the latter task was done by both men and women at this tåckarting , only men were ever up on the barn.

The previous work on the roof had reached the limit at which men on the ground could simply throw the sawgrass up to the working level using long pitchforks. Before we could start working, scaffolding platforms had to be built. The tractors could then load the grass on to the platforms, and men on the platforms could bundle it with ropes for lifting up chutes to the work level. Note the vidjor staged on the poles near the middle of the roof.

The vidjor really aren't "braids", they are more like yarn in that they are simply twisted out of a pile of loose sawgrass. The sawgrass blades have small hairs or serrations along their edges, which hook them to adjacent blades -- as one twists and pulls, the loose end of the yarn engages additional blades, resulting in a strand of any arbitrary length one desires. The vidjor used on the roof acreage ranged from 4-8 feet and about 3-4 inches across.

The vidjor really aren't "braids", they are more like yarn in that they are simply twisted out of a pile of loose sawgrass. The sawgrass blades have small hairs or serrations along their edges, which hook them to adjacent blades -- as one twists and pulls, the loose end of the yarn engages additional blades, resulting in a strand of any arbitrary length one desires. The vidjor used on the roof acreage ranged from 4-8 feet and about 3-4 inches across.