On my last late-night trip around town, back in the end of April, I noticed that somebody had been leaving little sketches of what appears to be an upside-down Russian Orthodox Church symbol (☦️). I counted three. Not sure if this is new or what it means, but I’m pretty familiar with the local vandalism at this point and I’d never seen them before. I found a fourth one today on the bridge. It looked new.
You wonder about things like this. People express themselves in strange ways around here, but this is an unusual one…cryptic, private, and ominous in a way the hipstery stuff isn’t.
I don’t know what to make of it. The markings are about as understated as possible: a crude stack of lines, unfamiliar and inconspicuous. (There’s a Russian Orthodox Church in Poughkeepsie; that’s all I can think of.) The fact that it’s upside down and backwards, going by the orientation of the diagonal crossbar, is a definite decision, and probably not a positive one if it’s actually an ROC cross. Changing the orientation on a symbol—like, say, the U.S flag—is often a derogatory gesture; a semiotic slur.
There are some other oddities, though. The diagonal crossbar is a lot larger than it would be on a standard cross, and there’s also a small additional mark at what would be the base if the symbol was upright. That little touch looks like a mistake, but it’s not; it shows up on all of them. I’ve never seen that on ROC crosses before—if that’s even what this is—and I don’t know what it indicates.
There’s something uneasily territorial about this…not art or advertising, more like a marking of some sort. Gang signage. Who knows. I’ll definitely be looking for it now.