Khavidak village is one of the historical villages of Yazd city and one of subordinate villages of Fahraj rural district, which is located 20 km away from this city. Due to its location in the Yazd-Ardakan plain, this village has hot and dry summers and cold and dry winters. Although the texture of the village has changed, it is relatively cohesive making it still valuable. Construction of new neighborhoods next to the old village and migration of people are the most important reasons preserving a large part of which, resulting into prevention of the historic houses’ destruction. The village has many historical monuments in its heart and has a relatively cohesive texture.
With a historical-analytical approach, this article intends to examine the village texture from a historical point of view and at the same time, it studies the climatic factors’ effect on the formation of the village texture. Accordingly, the most important questions raised in this article are: 1.In what periods was the village of Khavidak formed and developed? 2. According to the collected information, how the situation of the historical context of Khavidak village is?
The research was done in two ways. In the library studies through which the existing documents about the village were collected and the field studies which were done in two phases. In the first phase, archeological excavations were carried out in the village, which led to identification of many historical monuments in its historical context which had not been reported before. In the second phase, the questionnaires were prepared in which various factors such as the type of materials, residence, orientation and some others were considered. In order to obtain more accurate information in the field studies, the information of the villagers was also applied.
According to the obtained evidence, the growth and development process of the village can be examined from the pre-Islamic period to the contemporary period. The local texts of Yazd attribute its construction to the Sassanid period, which can be proved due to scattering of the archeological evidence around the village and the existence of a historical castle, which is dated to this period. During the early days of Islam, the village was formed around the old Jame Mosque but due to destruction and lack of the archeological excavations, no information about condition of the village during this period is found. In the Islamic Middle Ages, the village expanded to the south east, which is provable by the houses associated with the Ale Muzaffar period. During the Qajar period, the village was expanded in the same direction and reached its final level of development, and the scattered works identified from this period indicate this. In later periods, although the village was not expanded to the south east, there was a lot of manipulation into the historical texture by destroying some of the houses.
Khavidak village has a relatively dense historical texture that shows the characteristics of a village in the hot and dry climate. In this village, the houses are introverted and have different spaces such as the central courtyard, hall, winter and summer sections, basement and microclimate inside the central courtyard. In construction, although houses have been built with the modern materials in recent decades, still historic houses with the domestic rural building materials have been built and this process has continued until the Pahlavi period. According to surveys, a large number of village houses have been abandoned which indicates an increase in the destruction process and exposes the valuable historical monuments scattered.
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