This craft is known to many people of the Soviet and post-Soviet era by the song that was popular at the time about Kostya the Sailor. There, the sailor Sonya moors the fishing boat. But, like many concepts of our native language, this word has several meanings. We will tell you more in our next article.
Barges are boats
As already mentioned, in the first place, these are not too large boats. According to many dictionaries and other sources, longboats are self-propelled vessels that were designed for transportation on roads, in ports or harbors. Could be transported as passengers, for example, a team to their ship, and cargo, for example, anchors. In Italian, a word of similar consonance means “big boat”, as in the Netherlands. More specifically: longboats are multi-paddled (from 14 to 22) boats, more than 12 meters long, with a displacement of up to five tons, two-masted.
As they say in Odessa ...
The Odessa tradition of navigation also has its own names for boats: yala and longboat, scow and felucca. These names came from different languages of the world. But in the Black Sea, and in the Sea of Azov gradually adapted to local conditions. How the terms run from one locality to another, from century to century, can be traced on this concept. Longboats are, one might say, a Dutch invention. In the strong medieval fleets, they were the longest high-speed sailing boats at 2 masts, with 22 oars.
In Odessa pre-revolutionary port realities, longboats are the main assistants in unloading in raids. There were such vessels of a much larger volume than Dutch boats. And if necessary, they could take a load of a little less than 15 tons on board, then bring it to the port and unload it. It was a small fleet in harbors and port.
Fishing
Later, Black Sea boats appeared, on which they went fishing. These longboats plowed the Black Sea, endowing consumers with a bull, mullet, tyulka. One of the inhabitants of Odessa did not eat the fish caught by the fishermen. Large processing workshops functioned along the entire Black Sea coast from the Danube to the Kerch Strait. And hereditary shipbuilders provided longboats for fishermen of the Black Sea coast. Of course, in the modern conditions of industrial fishing, the longboat has lost its significance, but has remained in history as the most used vessel at the beginning of the last century.
Criminal jargon
And this term in the language of crime means a high fence of the colony, surrounded by barbed wire. In the so-called hair dryer - a language not for the ears of others - it could also mean an attic and a zone forbidden to access.