Serge

A serge is, in its plainest description, a hitching post. It is a shaped length of larch or birch set upright in the ground, tall enough to tether an animal to, and in a herding society that is a wholly ordinary object to find outside a dwelling. What makes it more than that is where it is put and how it is cut.

Serge are set at homesteads, at graves, at the edges of places treated as significant, and at the sites of gatherings. The upper part is usually carved with grooves, rings or a stepped profile, and the ethnographic literature for both Buryatia and the Sakha Republic reports these bands as separate tethering points for riders from different levels of the world rather than as ornament. Cloth ribbons are tied around them, offerings are left at the base, and a post at a grave marks it in a way a stone would not.

Because the object is simple and public, it survived the twentieth century better than costumes and drums did, and it is the element of the older practice that came back fastest. Since the 1990s posts have been erected across Buryatia and Sakha in large numbers, at private houses and at public sites both, some carved traditionally in wood and some cast in concrete or fabricated in metal.

The serge sits at an awkward and interesting point between a ritual object and a public monument, and the last thirty years have pushed it further in the second direction. A post erected at a family homestead for the household's own reasons is one thing. A post erected at a road junction, a city square or the entrance to a district, carved to a standard design and photographed by visitors, is another, and both are now common across Buryatia and the Sakha Republic.

This is not a case of an old meaning being lost. It is a case of an object doing additional work. Posts went up in numbers from the 1990s onward at exactly the moment when Buryat and Sakha communities were re-establishing public practice after a long period in which it had been discouraged, and a serge is a cheap, legible and unmistakable statement of whose place this is. That the same object still carries ribbons and receives offerings does not make the civic use insincere.

For anyone reading the landscape, the practical consequence is that a serge cannot be dated by eye and cannot be assumed to be old. Most standing posts are recent. What is old is the form, and the habit of marking a place by driving something into the ground that a rider could tie a horse to.