Tents are usually considered as temporary shelter for recreational uses, but many people around the planet still live in what appear to be tents all of the time, forever. All round the year, whether winter or summer, these special structures house entire families against the elements. In the steppes of Mongolia and Central Asia, nomadic peoples still use felt-covered wood lattice yurts for homes. They are like tents that can be pitched anytime, anywhere, and yet are more spacious and robust, such that they can stand permanently if need be, as indeed many do nowadays when some steppe peoples no longer follow big herds around and are basically settled down in one place.
Technically speaking, a yurt isn’t quite a tent, though similarities abound much more than do differences. Tents conjure certain photographs that yurts don’t. For starters, a camping tent is typically short lived and generally practical, while yurts and tepees, a somewhat similar dwelling of certain native american clans, are supposed to endure as sole abodes of their inhabitants. Indeed, we do not speak of a tent’s inhabitants – not as such, anyhow – while with yurts and tepees it is entirely logical to do so.
These structures are in numerous ways much more home-like than any tent can be, though a variety of tents do exist on the market now such as backpacking tent. Until rather lately, for example, tents didn’t sometimes have windows or openings to permit smoke to escape or get out, while yurts and tepees do because cooking is anticipated to be done within them, indoors.
Still, some characteristics may continue to be different between these sorts of structures and tents. Due to their virtually entirely different purposes, tents don’t have walls as thick as those of yurts and tepees, as an example. Fans in the West have changed the yurt and expanded on its ideas to make new forms of dwelling, frequently made with modern hi-tech materials. They also are not generally intended to be moved regularly and some are designed to be permanent structures and practically immobile.
