Today I'll show and tell a few of the charming homes I saw in Friesian towns and villages. 

Slanted rooflines are characteristic of Holland's architecture, to keep snow from building up on the roofs during wintertime.  Many of the roofs still have some, or all, of their area covered with thatch.  The house pictured below sports modern, ceramic roof tiles. 

Notice the painted design on the window shutters.  This design and colour combination are recurrent decorative themes in Dutch architecture.  The Dutch love bright colours, especially primary colours! You will see more of this in a later post in which I will show you acres of  brightly-coloured fishing boats at dock. 

This house has a very interesting combination of the old-fashioned thatch and modern roof tiles.  Thatch is actually a rather expensive style of roofing, because the labour involved in installing it is considerable, and it wears out quickly so it must be redone often:

Here is a roof completely thatched:

This one has a namsard-style roofline.  I think it looks boxy and not very pretty, but "there is no accounting for taste!"  The window shutters are pretty, though.

This one charmed me. 

This grouping of houses was located at the bottom of an ancient "terpen" (I'll show you terpens in a later post.)  This village is in a very remote part of north Friesland and it has a lot of history surrounding it.  The terpen (ancient dwelling mound) dates back well before the birth of Christ.  The village was a stronghold of the Dutch Resistance during the dark, horrible days of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Holland.  There were some remote villages that the Nazis didn't try to take over because experience taught them that there wasn't much to steal or exploit from the poor people living there, and the residents would put up such a stubborn fight that it just wasn't worth it to try and conquer them, so in these little pockets of civilization, people lived at peace.  The Resistance members often used these places to hide weapons and people - maybe men hiding from conscription to German work camps, maybe Jewish people trying to avoid the gas chambers ....  My cousin Grietje told me that she was very familiar with this particular village and the people that used to live there.  She said that to her knowledge, every one of this group of homes held a Resistance member and that many people were hiding there during those years.

Next post will show you some rural architecture in the province of Friesland.