Choron

A choron is turned and carved from a single block of wood, usually birch, into a tall narrow cup that stands considerably higher than it is wide. Its outer surface is worked into horizontal bands of incised ornament, ridges, notches, chevrons and rows of small repeated cuts, so that the whole body is banded from foot to rim. Small ones are made for individual use. Large ceremonial ones can be very substantial, and these often stand not on a single foot but on three legs, which are described as the hooves of a horse.

The horse reference is not decorative. What a choron holds is kumys, mare's milk fermented into a mildly alcoholic drink, and among the Sakha the horse, the milk and the summer are bound together in a way that a single vessel form gathers up. The banded carving is read in the same register, as a stack of levels rather than as a pattern.

Because the vessel is turned from one piece with no joints, size is limited by the block available, which makes the largest ceremonial chorons genuinely difficult objects to make. They are treated accordingly, kept between festivals rather than used through the year.

Size varies enormously. A personal choron may hold a cupful. Festival examples made for a public Ysyakh can be waist high and take two people to lift when full, and those are commissioned rather than kept casually.

The choron belongs to Ysyakh, the Sakha summer festival held around the solstice, and its use there is a sequence of offering before it is a sequence of drinking. Kumys is scattered toward the fire and toward the sky first. Only then does the vessel pass among the people present, and at a large gathering it moves through many hands.

That order matters for how the object should be understood. A choron is not a drinking cup that acquired a ceremonial version. The libation is the point, and the shared drinking follows from it, which is why the largest examples are made to be handled by several people in turn rather than by one.

Ysyakh itself was discouraged and at points prohibited under Soviet rule, and was revived on a substantial scale in the later twentieth century. It is now the principal public festival of the Sakha Republic and draws very large crowds. The choron came back with it and has since become one of the most reproduced Sakha objects, made as a souvenir, cast as a monument, printed on official material and used as a general emblem of the republic. A visitor is far more likely to meet the form as a symbol than as a vessel in use, and it is worth knowing which one is in front of you.