Village

• 1. Introduction

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  A village sits between two thresholds. It is larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town, and some geographers fix its boundaries at between 500 and 2,500 inhabitants. That single span hides an astonishing variety. In one place a village is a cluster of houses on stilts beside a paddy field. In another it is a gated subdivision for the wealthy. In twenty American states it is a precise form of municipal government with its own powers and obligations. "The soul of India lives in its villages," Mahatma Gandhi declared at the beginning of the 20th century. How did one word come to hold so many different worlds? What makes a settlement a village rather than a town, and who gets to decide? And why do so many cultures still measure their identity against this small, close-knit form of living? The answers stretch from a Welsh church to a Cossack farm, from a Yiddish market town to an Iroquoian word that became the name of a nation.

• 2. Drawing The Line

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  In Great Britain, a hamlet earned the right to be called a village when it built a church. That single structure marked the boundary, making the village the center of worship for an ecclesiastical parish. A village should not have a regular agricultural market, nor a town hall, nor a mayor. If it is the principal settlement of a civil parish, the body that runs it is a parish council or parish meeting, never a town or city council. In Russia, the formal indication of status was once religious too. A city, or gorod, had a cathedral. A selo had a church. A derevnya had neither. The dwellings of a village sit fairly close to one another, not scattered broadly across the landscape like a dispersed settlement. Homes were historically situated together for sociability and defence, with the surrounding land farmed. Villages are normally permanent, with fixed dwellings, though transient villages also exist. In Italy, no legal definition of village exists in law, yet a settlement of fewer than 2,000 people is usually described as one. The line, it turns out, is drawn differently in every country that tries to draw it.

• 3. A Word In Many Tongues

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  The English word village descends from Middle English village, from Old French village, from Latin villaticus, ultimately from the Latin villa. The same idea travels under dozens of other names. Selo is the Slavic word for village in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, North Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine, and many places bear the name Novo Selo, meaning "New Village." In Afghanistan the deh is a mid-size settlement, larger than the qala but smaller than the shar, the town with its governmental buildings. Kazakhstan has the auyl, and Vietnam the lang. A striking thread runs through Asia. The Indonesian desa derives from a Sanskrit word meaning "country," found in the name Bangladesh, while the Minangkabau nagari comes from another Sanskrit word meaning "city," found in a name like Srinagar. The Slovak dedina may root in the verb dedit, "to inherit," a memory of whole villages inherited by noblemen. Even the smallest names have their own discipline. In toponomastic terminology, the names of individual villages are called comonyms, from the Ancient Greek words for village and name.

• 4. The Asian Village

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  According to the 2011 census of India, 69 percent of Indians, around 833 million people, live in villages, spread across a total of 649,481 of them. Their scale ranges wildly: 236,004 Indian villages hold fewer than 500 people, while 3,976 hold more than 10,000. Most have their own temple, mosque, or church, sometimes two or more. The Vietnamese village, or lang, formed the basis of Vietnamese society and stands as a typical symbol of Asian agricultural production. It typically contains a village gate, bamboo hedges, a communal house where the tutelary deity is worshiped, a shared well, paddy fields, temples, and the houses of every family. Villagers share the same bloodline and are usually rice farmers. A Vietnamese saying captures the weight of this loyalty: "the king's law yields to village customs." It is common for villagers there to prefer burial in their own village upon death. In Malaysia, a kampung is defined as a locality with 10,000 or fewer people, led since historical times by a penghulu, the village chief with power to hear civil matters. Malay and Indonesian villagers practice gotong royong, the "joint bearing of burdens."

• 5. Vanished And Remembered

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  A shtetl was a small market town or village with a majority Jewish population in central and eastern Europe. The word is Yiddish, from shtot, meaning town, with the diminutive suffix -l. Shtetlekh first appeared in the 13th century and remained characteristic of Jewish life until the 1940s. They live on in literature, art, theatre, and film, in the writing of Mendele Mocher Sforim, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Sholem Aleichem. Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman stories, set in the fictional shtetl of Anatevka, became the stage play Fiddler on the Roof. During the Holocaust, most shtetlekh were depopulated of their Jewish communities through mass deportations or liquidations. Many are memorialized in yizkor books, written testimonies describing communities destroyed in those years. Other villages vanished more quietly. In Britain, deserted medieval villages sometimes left behind a church or a manor house, and sometimes nothing but bumps in the fields. Clearances came after the Black Death, or to make way for sheep, game estates, or enclosure. In the Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s, central planners deliberately depopulated smaller villages, pulling farm workers out of hamlets they called "prospectless" and into larger collective settlements.

• 6. The American Exception

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  In contrast to the Old World, the village in Canada and the United States is largely disconnected from its rural and communal origins. In twenty U.S. states, "village" refers to a specific form of incorporated municipal government, similar to a city but with less authority. The distinction rests not on population but on the relative powers granted and the obligations to provide services. The numbers defy intuition. Hempstead, the largest village in New York, has 55,000 residents, making it more populous than some of the state's cities, though New York villages may not exceed 5 square miles in area. Schaumburg, Illinois, counted 78,723 residents at the 2020 census. At the opposite extreme, the smallest incorporated village in the country is Dering Harbor, New York, with a population of just over 10. The rules shift from state to state. In Wisconsin a village is always legally separate from the towns it was incorporated from, with Menomonee Falls the largest at over 32,000 residents. In Ohio, villages become cities once they reach a population of at least 5,000. The very name can carry the whole meaning. In North Carolina, the only difference between cities, towns, and villages is the term itself.

• 7. An Ideal Worth Selling

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  For many British people, the village represents an ideal of Great Britain, seen as far from the bustle of modern life, quiet and harmonious if a little inward-looking. This vision of an unspoilt Arcadia surfaces in the radio serial The Archers and in the best kept village competitions. Several countries have turned that longing into formal recognition. Les Plus Beaux Villages de France was created in 1982 to promote small and picturesque French villages of quality heritage, and by July 2023 it had listed 172 villages. Italy followed in 2001 with I Borghi piu belli d'Italia, its motto "The charm of hidden Italy," listing 361 villages by November 2023. That Italian association signed a global agreement with ENIT in 2016 and an agreement with Costa Cruises in 2017, offering villages to cruise passengers arriving in Italian ports. In Bulgaria the same impulse is called selski turizam, village tourism, drawing visitors for the atmosphere, crafts, and hospitality. Elsewhere the word has drifted entirely toward leisure. In Australia and New Zealand it now attaches mainly to planned shopping areas, ski resorts, and retirement communities, a long way from the fortified Maori pa or the fields that homes once huddled together to defend.