Young Curly Blonde Girl Wearing A Red Dress In The Village

The historically Cossack regions of Southern Russia and parts of Ukraine, with their fertile soil and absence of serfdom, had a rather different pattern of settlement from central and northern Russia. While peasants of central Russia lived in a village around the lord's manor, a Cossack family often lived on its own farm, called khutor. A number of such khutors plus a central village made up the administrative unit stanitsa (Russian: стани́ца; Ukrainian: станиця, stanytsia). Such a stanitsa village, often with a few thousand residents, was usually larger than a selo in central Russia.
The term aul/aal is used to refer mostly Muslim-populated villages in Caucasus and Idel-Ural, without regard to the number of residents.