Today’s article about the Guardian-sponsored yurt being used for interviews at the Hay Festival got me thinking about the yurt as a structure for our times. The Turkic word “yurt” refers not to the wood-and-felt tent itself, but to the imprint left on the land once the tent is gone, packed up and relocated by its nomadic owners. By extension the term has come to mean, for its Central Asian users, not only tent or home, but kin and homeland. A connection not just to the immediate landscape but also to nationhood is indicated by the use of a stylised version of the yurt’s crown in the Kyrgyz flag. Traditionally the crown (or “tyndyk”) is passed between generations of a family, whatever the other modifications made to what is, in essence, a temporary structure.
The Turkic term “yurt” does not refer to the tent itself, then. Reference to the physical structure has accrued to the term, or its synonyms, in other cultures. The Turkic-speakers are on to something, thinking primarily of what we might today term their environmental footprint, and of the associations formed within their families and communities, inter-generationally. It is in part the nomadic lifestyle that allows a focus on the landscape and its resources, as well as bonds beyond the material – if you are forever to lose the particularity of place, and if the precise structure of your shelter has an element of contingency, your notion of home must be understood through other means.
The fashion for yurts has increased in the Western world since the 1970s, often billed as a sustainable way of living. Yurts play a crucial role in many eco holidays. We would do well to remember that the word itself reorients the yurt-dweller towards the structure’s physical (and emotional) footprint - a connection between dwelling and earth.
(Illustration: Mongolian Ger construction sketch by P.R. King)
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