Dacha
seasonal or year-round second home
A dacha (Russian: дача, IPA: [ˈdatɕə] ) is a seasonal or year-round second home, often located in the exurbs of post-Soviet countries, including Russia. A cottage (коттедж, kottedzh) or shack serving as a family's main or only home, or an outbuilding, is not considered a dacha, although some dachas recently have been converted to year-round residences and vice versa.
The noun "dacha", coming from verb "davat" (to give), originally referred to land allotted by the tsar to his nobles; and indeed the dacha in Soviet times is similar to the allotment in some Western countries – a piece of land allotted, normally free, to citizens by the local government for gardening or growing vegetables for personal consumption. With time the name for the land was applied to the building on it. In some cases, owners occupy their dachas for part of the year and rent them to urban residents as summer retreats. People living in dachas are colloquially called dachniki (дачники); the term usually refers not only to dacha dwellers but to a distinctive lifestyle. The Russian term is often said to have no exact counterpart in English.
Dachas are common in Russia, and are also widespread in most parts of the former Soviet Union and in some countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Surveys in 1993–1994 suggest about 25% of Russian families living in large cities had dachas. Most dachas are in colonies of dachas and garden plots near large cities.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Dacha” as seasonal or year-round second home. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as seasonal or year-round second home. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q160169. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1993 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dacha” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.