Černá kuchyně v Červeném dvoře

A smoke chamber inside the house

At Červený dvůr, the smoke installation was not a separate garden shed. A heritage inventory identifies a double-leaf-doored opening in the chimney, on the northeast side of the dwelling's hall, as an udírna—a smoke chamber. Remains of the černá kuchyně, or black kitchen, were beside it. The black kitchen and the chimney chamber are related parts of one domestic arrangement, but the terms describe different features.

The record makes this a built feature of a particular house: it could not be moved to another site without rebuilding the surrounding dwelling. Its position within a chimney is the strongest functional evidence available. The description does not give the chamber's dimensions, internal fittings, fuel, smoke route beyond the chimney, or a method for controlling draft. It also does not identify what food was smoked there. Those absences prevent a reliable reconstruction of a batch or of the room's working temperatures.

The farmstead and its setting

The feature belongs to the dwelling at Červený dvůr in Pražské Předměstí, now part of Hradec Králové in the Královéhradecký kraj of Czechia. The National Heritage Institute describes the house as a late-Baroque farmstead with red facades, a mansard roof and a hipped dormer. The 2025 archaeological account places the estate on a low terrace on the right bank of the Elbe, over claystone and marl overlain by sand. It describes the local soils as relatively poor and sandy.

The chronology of the farmstead is not settled in the inspected sources. The heritage account published in 2016 places the house in the second half of the eighteenth century. Radek Bláha's archaeological study, drawing on written records and a 2022 investigation of vanished outbuildings, argues that the estate was probably built near the beginning of the nineteenth century and first appears in records in 1802. This newer study adds context for the wider property, but its excavated structures do not date the smoke chamber.

A bounded reconstruction

The heritage record supports identifying the chimney opening as a smoke chamber and its relation to the adjoining black kitchen. The exterior photograph shows the actual dwelling, including its roof form and chimneys, but it does not expose the interior opening. No measured plan or construction sequence for that chamber was available in the sources used here, so this page does not present a build recipe. Nor does it turn the archaeological study's evidence about outbuildings into evidence about smoking. The building profile is useful for understanding a documented smoke installation in context, while the chamber's detailed construction and use remain unrecorded.