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.