This chapter is an attempt to retrace the main trends of the ethnic development of Anatolian Ossetians, a small community that has received little attention from scholars of either the Middle East or the Caucasus and is usually treated in travelogues and scholarly literature as an element of the much wider entity of the North Caucasian, or Circassian diaspora.

The homeland of the Ossetian people (self-appellations: Iron, Digoron) is located on the northern and southern slopes of the central part of the Greater Caucasus Range, or what is now the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania, a federal subject of Russia, and the former South Ossetian Autonomous Region of Georgia (independence unilaterally proclaimed in 1990). The Ossetian language belongs to the north-eastern division of the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, being the only descendant of the dialects of ancient and early medieval inhabitants of the Ponto-Caspian steppes, that is, the Scythians, Sarmatians and particularly the Alans. The vast majority of Ossetians in the Caucasus are followers of Orthodox Christianity, which was introduced among Alans in the tenth century from Byzantium, while a minority (all traditional nobility and some rural communities) adopted Sunni Islam from Kabarda in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, pre-Christian and pre-Islamic beliefs have always played a significant role in their spiritual life. In terms of both material and non-material traditional culture (such as social organisation, customs, law, morality, ethical values, mythology, architecture, costume and weaponry), Ossetians have a great deal in common with their Caucasian and Turkic-speaking neighbours and generally fit well within the framework of the North Caucasian mountain civilisations, maintaining at the same time some appreciable marks of affinity with the old Indo-Iranian world.

Here I examine the dynamics of migratory movements of Ossetian groups from the Caucasus to Anatolia and particularly in Anatolia itself, the mechanisms of adaptation and self-organisation developed by them in their adopted country, their place in the local and regional ethno-social structure and the nature of changes in their cultural profile and collective identity over time. The study is based chiefly on the data from accessible written sources supplemented by the information gathered during personal interviews with the representatives of various groups of the Ossetian diaspora in Turkey during the 1990s and 2000s.