Chardaks – tiny structures built for repose beside farmers’ fields – abound throughout the Balkan and Anatolian countryside. Across many languages and cultures, this word and building form remain surprisingly consistent, adopted by peoples of differing religions and languages. The modest chardak invites us to speculate about broad cross-cultural themes that link diverse architectural cultures. Over the past fifteen years we have collaborated in the study of vernacular wooden architecture of the Balkans. This study has covered not only artifacts of the Balkans but also those of the Venetian, Austro-Hungarian, Slavic, Ottoman and Greek neighbors who contributed both population and settlements to this diverse cultural region. The goals of this research are a survey and comparative analysis of settlement types, building elements, and variations in form, construction and detail, to reveal patterns and similarities. Extensive fieldwork has yielded a multitude of data, but the task of analysis remains incomplete. The chardak is a pervasive building type that has emerged as a particularly provocative artifact for concentrated study. Both the architectural idea and the word came from the East -- c˘ardak is defined in Serbo-Croatian dictionaries as of Turkish origin, with Persian roots from the word cartaq, in which the root car means “four” and taq means “arch.” Words from these roots with similar meanings exist today in Turkish, Greek, Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and even farther east in Aramaic and Farsi. It is thought that the earliest chardak structure of the ancient middle east was made by farmers near their fields, by joining together four adjacent saplings in order to form a platform for sitting above the ground, exposed to breeze and shaded by foliage overhead. Over time, this temporary, agricultural structure (this “primitive hut”) grew to be part of houses, first as an exterior arbor and then built into the body of the dwelling itself, always maintaining its essential qualities of elevation, repose, sociability, and connection with nature. Along the way, the concept of chardak entered folk culture and acquired its most vivid definition as “a place between heaven and earth.” What accounts for the temporal endurance and geographic spread of this tiny building type? How has its essential meaning survived? Perhaps we cannot answer these questions, but in recording and comparing the easily overlooked chardaks (everyday structures, outside the mainstream of cultural themes) we can make a convincing argument for the importance of such inquiry. With the chardak as a focus for this presentation and paper, our objective is to define approaches of the larger project on Balkan vernacular architecture. Examples (photographs, drawings and analytic diagrams) will describe environmental settings, spatial characteristics and details of materials and assemblages that have been recorded across the landscapes of the Balkans and Anatolia.