What a dacha actually is

A dacha is a plot of land outside the city with something built on it. Sometimes that something is a solid house, more often it is small, self-built, added to across decades and heated by a stove. The land matters more than the building: beds for potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes and dill, fruit bushes, and a greenhouse made from whatever was available.

The seasonal rhythm is visible from the city. From March, windowsills in flats fill with seedlings in plastic cups. From May, Friday traffic out of every large city becomes a queue, and the metro carries people with rucksacks and buckets. In August the kitchen fills with jars, because a lot of what the plot produces is preserved rather than eaten fresh.

The social part is the point as much as the vegetables. Grilled meat on skewers over coals, a banya if there is one, neighbours through the fence, children left largely to themselves, and long evenings at a table under an apple tree. For urban families it is the whole of childhood for three months a year.

The dachas themselves are a Soviet inheritance: plots handed out through workplaces, with rules about what you could build. That history is why so many of them are modest, why they cluster in cooperatives with narrow lanes, and why the cultural meaning is closer to 'allotment with a bed in it' than to 'second home'.