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Ossetian mosaic.jpg
Total population
Regions with significant populations
 Russia 528,515[1]
especially in: Flag of North Ossetia.svg North Ossetia 445,310[2]
 South Ossetia:
(a state with a limited de jure recognition of its independence)
(excluding South Ossetia)
 Syria 59,200[5]
 Turkey 36,900[5]
 Uzbekistan 8,170[5]
 Tajikistan 5,300[5]
 Ukraine 4,830[6]
 Azerbaijan 2,340[5]
 Turkmenistan 2,170[5]
 Kazakhstan 2,090[5]
 Kyrgyzstan 937[5]
 Belarus 784[5]
 Armenia 392[5]
 Moldova 353[5]
 Latvia 256[7]
 Estonia 116[8]
 Australia n/a[9]
Ossetian, Russian, Georgian
Predominantly Orthodox Christianity
with a minority professing Ossetian Traditional Religion and Islam
Related ethnic groups
Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans
Other Iranian peoples, other neighbouring North Caucasian peoples, and the Jassic people of Hungary.

The Ossetians (Ossetian: ирæттæ, irættæ) are an Iranian ethnic group of the Caucasus Mountains, indigenous to the region known as Ossetia.[10][11][12] They speak Ossetic, an Iranian language of the Eastern branch of the Indo-European languages family, with most also fluent in Russian as a second language. The Ossetians are mostly Eastern Orthodox Christian, with a Muslim minority.

The Ossetians mostly populate Ossetia, which is politically divided between North Ossetia–Alania in Russia, and South Ossetia, which since the 2008 South Ossetia war has been de facto independent from Georgia.


The Ossetians and Ossetia received their name from the Russians, who adopted the Georgian designations Osi (sing., pl.: Osebi) and Oseti ("the land of Osi"), used since the Middle Ages for the Iranian-speaking population of the Central Caucasus and probably based on the old Alan self-designation "As". As the Ossetians lacked any single inclusive name for themselves in their native language, these terms were accepted by the Ossetians themselves already before their integration into the Russian Empire.[13]

This practice was put into question by the new Ossetian nationalism in the early 1990s, when the dispute between the Ossetian subgroups of Digoron and Iron over the status of the Digoron dialect made the Ossetian intellectuals search for a new inclusive ethnic name. This, combined with the effects of the Georgian-Ossetian conflict, led to the popularization of "Alania", the name of the medieval Sarmatian confederation, to which the Ossetians traced their origin, and inclusion of this name into the official republican title of North Ossetia in 1994.[13]


  • Iron in the east and south form a larger group of Ossetians. Irons are divided into several subgroups: Kudar, Tual (including Urstual), Chsan and North Irons.
    • Kudar (sometimes misspelled Tual, after the indigenous Dvals people), the southern group of Ossetians.
    • Tual in the central part of Ossetia.
    • Chsan in the east of South Ossetia.
  • Digoron in the west. They came under the influence of the neighbouring Kabarday people who introduced Islam. Today the two main Digoron districts in North Ossetia are Digora district or Digorskiy rayon (with Digora as its centre) and Irafskiy rayon or Iraf district (with Chikola as its centre). Digora district is Christian while some parts of Iraf district are Muslim. The dialect spoken in Digor part of North Osetia is Digoron, the most archaic form of Ossetian language.



Main article: Ossetian mythology

The folk beliefs of the Ossetian people are rooted in their Sarmatian origin and Christian religion, with the pagan gods transcending into Christian saints. The Nart saga serves the basic pagan mythology of the region.[14]


Main article: Ossetian music


Charnel vaults at a necropolis near the village of Dargavs, North Ossetia

Prehistory (Early Alans)[edit]

Main article: Alans

The Ossetians descend from the Alans, a Sarmatian tribe (Scythian subgroup of the Iranian ethnolinguistic group).[15] About AD 200, the Alans were the only branch of the Sarmatians to keep their culture in the face of a Gothic invasion, and the Alans remaining built up a great kingdom between the Don and the Volga, according to Coon, The Races of Europe. Between AD. 350 and 374, the Huns destroyed the Alan kingdom, and a few survive to this day in the Caucasus as the Ossetes.

Middle Ages[edit]

Main article: Alania
Map of Alania at 1000 AD

In the 8th century a consolidated Alan kingdom, referred to in sources of the period as Alania, emerged in the northern Caucasus Mountains, roughly in the location of the latter-day Circassia and the modern North Ossetia–Alania. At its height, Alania was a centralized monarchy with a strong military force and benefited from the Silk Road.

Forced out of their medieval homeland (south of the River Don in present-day Russia) during Mongol rule, Alans migrated towards and over the Caucasus mountains, where they subsequently would form three ethnographical groups; the Iron, Digoron, and Kudar. The Jassic people were a group that migrated in the 13th century to Hungary.

Modern history[edit]

In recent history, the Ossetians participated in Ossetian-Ingush conflict (1991–1992) and Georgian–Ossetian conflicts (1918–1920, early 1990s) and in the 2008 South Ossetia war between Georgia and Russia.

Key events:


Main article: Ossetian language

The Ossetian language belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family.

Ossetian is divided into two main dialect groups: Ironian (os. – Ирон) in North and South Ossetia and Digorian (os. – Дыгурон) of western North Ossetia. There are some subdialects in those two: like Tualian, Alagirian, Ksanian, etc. The Ironian dialect is the most widely spoken.

Ossetian is among the remnants of the Scytho-Sarmatian dialect group which was once spoken across Central Asia. Other surviving languages closely related to Ossetian are Yaghnobi,[22] Pashto[22] and Pamiri languages,[22] all spoken more than 2,000 km to the east in Afghanistan, northwestern Pakistan and some parts of Tajikistan.


The Alans were partially Christianized by Byzantine missionaries in the beginning of the 10th century.[23] Most of the Ossetians became Eastern Orthodox Christians in the 12th–13th centuries under the influence of Georgia.[24][25]

As the time went by, Digor in the west came under Kabardian and Islamic influence. It was through the Kabarday (an East Circassian tribe) that Islam was introduced into the region in the 17th century.[26]

Kudar in the southernmost region became part of what is now South Ossetia, and Iron, the northernmost group, came under Russian rule after 1767, which strengthened Orthodox Christianity considerably.

Today, the majority of Ossetians, from both North and South Ossetia, follow Eastern Orthodoxy.

Paganism is still very widespread among Ossetians, with rich ritual traditions, sacrificing animals, holy shrines, non-Christian saints, etc. Percentage of pagans in population is highest in North Ossetia among all regions of Russia.[27] There are pagan temples, known as kuvandony in most of the villages.[28] Currently the Osset pagans are united under the organization Etseg Din (Ǽцǽг Дин).[29]


The vast majority of Ossetians live in Russia (according to the Russian Census (2002)):

Second-largest population of Ossetians is in South Ossetia.

There is a significant number living in north-central Georgia (Trialeti). A large Ossetian diaspora lives in Turkey, and Ossetians have also settled in Belgium France, Sweden, Syria, the USA (New York City, Florida and California as examples), Canada (Toronto), Australia (Sydney) and other countries all around the world.


The Ossetians are a unique ethnic group of the Caucasus, being the only people found on both the north and south slopes of the mountain, also speaking an Indo-European language surrounded by Caucasian ethnolinguistic groups. The Y-haplogroup data indicate that North Ossetians are more similar to other North Caucasian groups, and South Ossetians are more similar to other South Caucasian groups, than to each other. Also, with respect to mtDNA, Ossetians are significantly more similar to Iranian groups than to Caucasian groups. It is thus suggested that there is a common origin of Ossetians from Iran, followed by subsequent male-mediated migrations from their Caucasian neighbours [30][31]


See also[edit]


  2. ^ 2002 Russian census
  3. ^ (2007) PCGN Report "Georgia: a toponymic note concerning South Ossetia" (page 3)[1].
  4. ^ (2002 census)
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Joshua Project
  6. ^ 2001 Ukrainian census
  7. ^ [2]
  8. ^ 2000 Estonian census
  9. ^ Ossetians
  10. ^ Bell, Imogen. Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia, p. 200.
  11. ^ Mirsky, Georgiy I. On Ruins of Empire: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Former Soviet Union, p. 28.
  12. ^ Mastyugina, Tatiana. An Ethnic History of Russia: Pre-revolutionary Times to the Present, p. 80.
  13. ^ a b Shnirelman, Victor (2006). The Politics of a Name: Between Consolidation and Separation in the Northern Caucasus. Acta Slavica Iaponica 23, pp. 37–49.
  14. ^ Lora Arys-Djanaïéva "Parlons ossète" (Harmattan, 2004)
  15. ^ James Minahan, "One Europe, Many Nations", Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000. pg 518: "The Ossetians, calling themselves Iristi and their homeland Iryston are the most northerly Iranian people. ... They are descended from a division of Sarmatians, the Alans who were pushed out of the Terek River lowlands and in the Caucasus foothills by invading Huns in the 4th century AD.
  16. ^ [3]
  17. ^ [4]
  18. ^ Svante E. Cornell, Small nations and great powers: a study of ethnopolitical conflict in the Caucasus. Routledge, 2001 ISBN 0-7007-1162-7
  19. ^ "South Ossetia – MSN Encarta". Archived from the original on 2009-11-01. 
  20. ^ http://www.gcsp.ch/e/publications/Issues_Institutions/Int_Organisations/Academic_Articles/Ghebali-Helsinki-3-04.pdf
  21. ^ http://www.obiv.org.tr/2005/avrasya/ehatipoglu.pdf
  23. ^ Kuznetsov, Vladimir Alexandrovitch. "Alania and Byzantine". The History of Alania. 
  24. ^ James Stuart Olson, Nicholas Charles Pappas. An Ethnohistorical dictionary of the Russian and Soviet empires. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994. p 522.
  25. ^ Ronald Wixman. The peoples of the USSR: an ethnographic handbook. M.E. Sharpe, 1984. p 151
  26. ^ James Minahan. Miniature empires: a historical dictionary of the newly independent states. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998. p.211
  27. ^ Arena - Atlas of Religions and Nationalities in Russia. Sreda.org
  28. ^ http://www.keston.org.uk/_russianreview/edition57/01-roschtin-about-south-alania.htm
  29. ^ http://osetins.com/print:page,1,1450-mestnaja-religioznaja-organizacija-tradicionnykh.html
  30. ^ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1529-8817.2004.00131.x/abstract
  31. ^ Genetic evidence concerning the origins of South and North Ossetians. by Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Evolutionary Genetics. Ann Hum Genet. 2004 Nov;68(Pt 6):588-99.


  • Nasidze et al., Mitochondrial DNA and Y-Chromosome Variation in the Caucasus, Annals of Human Genetics, Volume 68 Page 205 – May 2004
  • Nasidze et al., Genetic Evidence Concerning the Origins of South and North Ossetians (2004) [5]

External links[edit]