Small chapel, big issues

1In the mountain village of Nuzal, in the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania (Russian Federation), there is a small medieval burial vault. Ossetia’s mountains are strewn with such vaults. It is easy to pass by without noticing them. However, this particular vault is widely known in Ossetia and beyond for the medieval Christian frescoes painted inside, very rare for this area. It is not easy to see them properly—the space inside is extremely tight. These frescoes, painted in the early fourteenth century and presenting images of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, Saint George and several saints, define the status of the place, transforming it from an ordinary crypt into an Orthodox chapel. They are considered visual proof that Christianity came to the mountains of the North Caucasus long before Islam and long before the Russian Empire. Thus, the chapel in Nuzal, or Nuzaly arhuan in Ossetian (literally “the Nuzal church”), built in the twelfth or thirteenth century, is a key symbol of the Orthodox religious identity of Ossetians and Ossetia.

2North Ossetia-Alania, with about 700,000 inhabitants, is one of the so-called national republics of the North Caucasus region. The first part of the republic’s name—North Ossetia—indicates that the majority of the population are Ossetians, an Iranian-speaking people descended from the ancient nomadic Scythians and Sarmatians. North Ossetia was given national autonomy in 1924 as a result of administrative reform in the early Soviet state, which gave some ethnic groups the opportunity to have some kind of nation-state. The word “Alania” was introduced into the official name of the republic in 1995 following a wave of ethno-national activism triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The republic, once part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, did not gain independence after the demise of the Soviet Union, although Chechnya, which is geographically close to North Ossetia, tried hard to do so. But while staying within the Russian Federation, almost all ethno-national regions have emphasized local ethnic identity in their domestic policies and in policies of historical memory. By naming their republic Alania, the leaders of the national revivalism of the early 1990s and their contemporary successors pointed to the continuity of state sovereignty between the modern republic of North Ossetia and the medieval state of their ethnic Alan ancestors, which existed in the North Caucasus from the tenth century, falling under the blows of Mongol and Turkic conquerors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From this point of view, the vault in Nuzal is a key element in the historical imagination of Ossetians. According to some historians, Os-Bagatar, the legendary last king of Alania, may be buried there. This hypothesis has now become an objective fact for many.

3This small chapel thus combines two important aspects of Ossetians’ modern identity as a nation: the memory of their own ancient state and the memory of having become Christian centuries before the missionary activities of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The early adoption of Christianity by their ancestors was at the centre of a large commemorative campaign during the 1,100th anniversary of Christianity in Alania. This campaign culminated in an impressive celebration in September 2022. Ironically, this anniversary demonstrated that Alanian Christianity is older than Russian Christianity. However, during the preparations in 2021, this idea suited Moscow’s ecclesiastical and secular authorities, because it appeared that Christianity had begun to spread across the territory of modern Russia not from Ukrainian Kiev, now the capital of a foreign country, but from the (Russian) Northern Caucasus. As one Moscow official said in 2021, “the events associated with the 1,100th anniversary of Alania’s Christianisation should show the deep historical roots of Orthodoxy in Russia and contribute to strengthening the spiritual unity of the peoples of the country” (“V Severnoj Osetii…,” 2021).

4Leaving aside the Russian political elites’ ways of dealing with the past while denying the legitimacy of Ukraine’s independent statehood, let us return to North Ossetia. When it was preparing to celebrate this anniversary, the federal government allocated money to make the contemporary republic look as Orthodox as possible. In large churches, murals depicting scenes of Alania’s baptism appeared and heroes of Ossetia’s ethnic history were visually represented as Orthodox saints. Special efforts were made to restore and make as visible as possible in public spaces ancient buildings connected in one way or another to Orthodoxy. The purpose was to present the Russian state and the ROC, an active participant in these works, as custodians of Ossetia’s heritage. The head of the diocese, Archbishop Leonid of Vladikavkaz and Alania (a reference to medieval Alania was included here in his official title as well), spoke very clearly about these activities: “This is our heritage—churches, chapels, architectural monuments, even those not related to Christianity. I will strive to save them” (“Vladyka Leonid…,” 2016). The Nuzal chapel was part of this concern.

6In other words, the local diocese did a great deal to promote Nuzal as the main Ossetian national shrine. The aim of this information campaign was to strengthen the status of Orthodoxy as the native faith of the Ossetians. However, unintended results unsettled the organisers. A sharp public debate on the Christian past of the Alans, as well as the present and future of contemporary Ossetians, broke out. The clash revealed the specific attitude of an ethnically non-Russian people who are part of the larger political Russian nation to ethno-religious identity. Ironically, the restoration of the chapel in Nuzal, designed to increase the ROC’s authority, drew public attention to its opponents. The latter offered their own critical interpretation of the history of Orthodoxy in Ossetia and of what the real religion of the Ossetians is. As a result of the public debate over the excavation of this ancient cemetery, located next to a chapel that marks the space of Ossetian land as Orthodox, the very Orthodox identity of this space (and thus of Ossetians in general) has been vigorously challenged. This case will be discussed below.

7I was not a direct witness or participant in these events, although coincidentally I was present at the start of the excavations, later the subject of heated discussions. In early September 2020, I was collecting field materials on local heritage tourism and traveled to Nuzal with a group of tourists from Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia. I stood at the ancient chapel, listened to the guide’s story about the area’s heroic past and watched the excavations. The archaeologists, who had just started their research, were quietly doing their work. No one at that moment could have imagined that soon a drama would unfold around these excavations, in which a large number of very different people would take part. I gathered most of the information about these events on social networks. Numerous texts describing and evaluating these events were posted there, as well as videos made both in Nuzal and Vladikavkaz. All these materials were actively commented on and distributed via the WhatsApp and Telegram messengers. I also received information from friends whom I had acquired during fifteen years of fieldwork in North Ossetia. Six months later, I was able to talk to some of the participants in this story. They told me important details of the story, but did not change my general understanding of the public debate on the nature of the Ossetian ethnic religion.

8I begin by outlining the complexities of defining the Ossetian ethnic religion as linked to the political allegiance assigned to them. I move on to the criticism that emerged with the archaeological excavation of the burial ground, initiated during the restoration of the Nuzal chapel by the local Orthodox diocese. I analyze in more detail the arguments of one of the opponents, as his arguments largely determined the public reaction to the works and to the local Orthodox authorities. I conclude with general remarks about the religious marking of space in the context of a rivalry between groups with diverging views of the past of a land and a people.

Ossetian Religious Identity in the Current Political Agenda

9Mainstream Russian media usually present Ossetia as predominantly Orthodox, with an insignificant Muslim minority. According to the official version of the historical narrative, the ancestors of the Ossetians, the Alans, accepted Christianity at the state level in the tenth century from Byzantine missionaries (Kouznetsov and Lebedynsky, 2005: 175–182). When the Alanian state was crushed, the existing ecclesiastical structures connected with Byzantium were also destroyed. The descendants of the Alans, the Ossetians, were forced out of the fertile steppes of the North Caucasus foothills into narrow mountain gorges. They retained elements of Christian culture in their lives, but found themselves beyond the disciplinary control of church institutions. Sometimes Orthodox priests from Georgia reached them, but this did not change the overall picture—for several centuries, most Ossetians were not Christians in terms of their legal status. In other words, they were not baptized or given communion by the representatives of any official church.

10Christianity came to Ossetians again when the Russian Empire arrived in the Caucasus. The incorporation of the lands inhabited by Ossetians into Russia was a long and complicated process, full of brutal violence. Today it is hardly possible to unambiguously determine the date when Ossetia “joined” the empire. Perhaps one of the most important events was the establishment of the Vladikavkaz fortress in 1784. This act fixed the presence of the Russian state in this part of the North Caucasus, which became a condition for its inclusion into the system of imperial administration, firmly established during the Caucasian War. But one way or another, from the second half of the eighteenth century, imperial administrators did much to make Ossetians, whom they saw as former co-religionists, Christians again in the bosom of the ROC. In 1874, a special Vladikavkaz diocese was established (it was abolished in 1922 and re-established in 2011).

11Despite all these historical vicissitudes, the fact that the Alans were baptised in the Middle Ages is very important for the historical imagination of many of the republic’s inhabitants. This event is the starting point for the existence of Orthodoxy among Ossetians. The supposed ancient Orthodoxy of this people is also very important for the relations of Ossetian political elites with Moscow, because it makes “Orthodox” Ossetians the natural allies of their Russian coreligionists in the Caucasus, inhabited mostly by Muslims. Even the story of how the Ossetians became subjects of the Russian Empire was, until recently, a fairly straightforward narrative of “voluntary entry into Russia.” This version of events implies a special relationship of trust with Russia that supposedly distinguishes Ossetians from neighbouring Caucasian peoples, who were conquered by force of arms. In short, the republic’s loyalty to the federal centre is grounded on the Orthodox religious identity of the Ossetians and the place of Orthodoxy in their republic. But for many Ossetians, the role of Orthodoxy does not go unquestioned.

13The traditionalists have followers among Ossetian intellectuals. Not only have they convinced some opinion pollsters that their revivalist project is a true religion, along with Orthodox Christianity and Islam: they have also initiated such polls, explaining to respondents what “practicing the faith of their ancestors” means. The results unsurprisingly called into question the predominance of Orthodox Christianity in Ossetia.

14In reality, many Ossetians see no contradiction between being Orthodox and “practicing the faith of their ancestors” simultaneously; these two identities are not mutually exclusive, unlike Islam and Christianity or Orthodoxy and Catholicism. But for traditionalists, these socially overlapping identities seem a terrible violation of their rights and the logic of exclusionary religious identity, thus being in line with the dominant views of the three monotheisms (Brož, 2009). They believe that a person who considers himself Orthodox and at the same time practices the faith of the ancestors by performing traditional rituals denies the latter the status of a full-fledged religion, making it a disparate set of local “beliefs and customs.” The aim of the traditionalists is to convince their compatriots that Ossetians have and practice their own religion, to push them to discern it in their lives as a particular phenomenon and to practice it consciously.

15Return or conversion to the faith of the ancestors means that Ossetians, many of whom consider themselves Orthodox Christians, must abandon Christianity, which, according to the traditionalists, is the religion of outsiders (some traditionalists claim that Christianity was invented by Jews who wanted to use it to enslave the peoples of the world). To stop being Christians, according to the Ossetian nativists, their Orthodox fellow citizens do not have to do anything special. It is enough for them to admit that their ethnic culture is non-Christian in nature and that, by adhering to their ethnic traditions, they behave as non-Christians. It must be said that most Ossetians perceive “their” Orthodox Christianity as a vicarious religion, practiced by religious professionals in places where ordinary people do not need to go often, as is common in Russia in general among those who consider themselves Orthodox (Agadjanian, 2011: 18; Kormina and Luehrmann, 2018: 402; Benovska, 2020: 38–51). From the point of view of the traditionalists, since these people go to church rarely and adhere to Ossetian customs in their ritual life, they are not Christians. That is, the question of the religious identity of Ossetians is essentially a question of what religion underlies their ethnic traditions. In order to find out what that religion is, it is necessary to decide whether their ancestors were “nominal” or “real” Christians, or indeed whether they were Christians at all.

17The problem of the appropriation of non-Christian Ossetian heritage by the Orthodox is particularly acute for traditionalists with respect to ancient shrines. When one saw that in a shrine (dzuar in Ossetian) he considers Ossetian (and therefore not Christian) someone had installed Orthodox icons, he with annoyance said to me: “Why in the dzuar are there objects related to another religious denomination? Complete confusion in their heads, ignorance bordering on promiscuity, disregard for sacral values, and at the same time a lack of understanding of Christian basics ...”

18Meanwhile, the head of the diocese, as I mentioned, promised to take care of all such objects, even those not associated with Christianity. Legally “historical and cultural monuments” belong to the state: it is state officials who give some of these sites to certain religious organisations for temporary use. The definition of a particular object or building in terms of a certain religion are taken into consideration in this context. In North Ossetia, it usually turns out that such objects and buildings are originally Orthodox. It is thus decided to give them to an Orthodox institution. Yet, many ancient chapels were not used as churches for centuries, as there were no ecclesiastic structures in the region. They became local shrines (pilgrimage and veneration centres, the aforementioned dzuars) or were considered “graves of glorious ancestors,” even though in the traditional understanding of the divine among Ossetians, sacred shrines should not be associated geographically and ritually with death. Thus, traditionalists challenge the right of the Orthodox Church to use ancient buildings as Christian sanctuaries. They consider this illegal appropriation. One such case is the chapel in Nuzal.

19In 2016, the local authorities transferred the right to use the chapel to the ROC as a monument of medieval Christianity. In this situation, the diocese was entrusted with restoration. The traditionalists did not appreciate this decision. They claimed that the chapel was originally not a Christian shrine, but a non- and pre-Christian burial vault, remade by insidious Christian missionaries into a chapel. The controversy around Nuzal’s “religious identity” did not end there.

“We Need all the People to Stand Up and Kick Them Out of Here”

Those graves that are looted, [there are] no bones in them. They can’t find bones. They are being taken somewhere for something. You know how. It’s right under our noses. While we sleep, while we sleep, there is just desecration and looting ... of the graves of our ancestors. There is nothing worse for an Ossetian. There is nothing worse than touching the graves of our ancestors. It has been like this since Scythian times. Now it only continues. And other people are digging, and the people in charge of the work are, you know, Jews. Jews, who are in the service of the Russian Orthodox Church. To be frank and honest, the Jews are in charge of the work of the Krasnodar archaeologists. In short, they are conducted by Jews who work for the Russian Orthodox Church. In general, the Russian Orthodox Church, the diocese, is behind all this.... That’s the way things are. I need masses of Ossetians, the more Ossetians know about it the better. We need a wider public response, we need all the people to stand up and kick them out of here, to return the bones to their place and we’ll bury them back.

21The message was about the excavation of remains from ancient burials, carried out on the initiative of the local ROC diocese. The way in which the situation is described made it clear that the speaker is a convinced traditionalist.

22The anxiety of the message’s author was understandable. Like his associates, he insisted that the ancient Alans did not become real Christians in the tenth century but had remained committed to the faith of their ancestors. However, the results of the excavations may have cast doubt on this assertion. As I said, from the nativist point of view, a close connection between practices, ideas and identity defines true religion. The traditionalists boldly project this principle into the past. That is why any excavation carried out on any medieval burial ground is important for them, as it can bring evidence in favour of one or another point of view of who the ancestors of the Ossetians were in terms of their religion. If Christian artefacts are found in ancient graves, this would indicate that the buried people believed in Christ; if these items are not found, this would mean that they did not. The prospect of “Christian” archaeologists finding the remains of “Christian Alans” looked very real.

23The sharply alarmist voice message had the desired result for its author. Several dozen angry young men arrived at the excavation site and tried to stop the work, claiming that the archaeologists did not have the necessary permits. The incident came to violence, after which it turned out that the archaeologists did have all the necessary documents; they were allowed and even obliged to conduct excavations on this burial ground. At this time, it also became clear that the archaeologists had not stolen any bones.

24But the author of the WhatsApp message was partly right. The restoration work in the Nuzal chapel was carried out on the initiative of the local Orthodox diocese. Ironically, diocesan employees did not initially intend to excavate any ancient graves. The restorers stumbled upon the burial ground almost by chance. In this situation, according to law, it had to be excavated for the restoration work in the chapel to resume. The restorers appealed to the State Committee for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments to authorise the archaeological work. The committee did so and thus it, not the diocese, became the official ordering customer of the excavations. The archaeologists, who came from the neighbouring Krasnodar region (Krasnodarskii krai) to carry out these urgent excavations, had not imagined the complexity of the work’s political context. Not knowing that they were “mercenaries of the diocese,” they were extremely surprised by the aggressive reactions of some Ossetians and accusations that they were hired to plant “Christian artefacts” in ancient graves and therefore “Christianise” relatives and/or warriors of the last Alanian king (and thus the epic past of the entire people). Equally bizarre for them were the accusations that they were desecrating the graves of someone’s ancestors, as no one venerated those graves. This was simply because no one knew about them: they were covered by later layers and unnoticeable in the central village square.

25It should be noted here that although many archaeologists in Russia are not accustomed to encountering such problems, in other countries their colleagues are familiar with the fact that archaeological excavations often become the cause of postcolonial political conflict when local people resist the invasion of their sacred sites by the representatives of Western science (Smith, 2004: 26–31). The activities of the latter are seen as attempts not only to take possession of some valuable property, but also to appropriate the past of the people who live on the land, and often the land itself. This confrontation is especially pronounced when it comes to manipulating the burials of those people whom the locals consider to be their ancestors. What for representatives of the Western academy are simply things, objects, are treated by their opponents as subjects, as persons who can forgive, offend, punish, and to whom the living must be responsible. Archaeologists often do not realize that they are “objectifying” the people (Ferguson, 1996: 65) with whose remains they deal when excavating burial grounds. But this is well understood and felt by the locals. This acute sense of responsibility for and towards the dead is directly related to the fact that their presence acts “as a literal and metaphorical guarantee of rights to territory and the continuity of ways of life” (Shepherd, 2015: 15). This can explain “the peculiar and unexpected centrality of the role that the ancestral dead have come to play in a postcolonial politics of memory and identity, as figures around which to organize local resistances and a set of claims from the subaltern side of the colonial difference” (ibid.: 12).

26Many people who spoke and wrote about the Nuzal excavations were really frightened about what might happen to the remains found by archaeologists. I conversed with an acquaintance of mine, a schoolteacher in Vladikavkaz, about this problem on the phone. She tearfully assured me that the bones would definitely be taken away from Ossetia, lost, thrown away or, much worse, replaced. The prospect that the remains of their dead would be replaced by bones of an unknown origin really terrified my interlocutor.

27In the story of the excavations in Nuzal, the postcolonial protest against the actions of “foreign” archaeologists (many people lamented that the excavations were not carried out by Ossetians) was complicated by the fact that almost all representatives of the republican elites saw the situation completely differently. The protesters saw the situation from a (post)colonial perspective: some strangers (Russians), who have no moral obligations either to the dead or to living locals, came to indifferently carry out someone else’s orders and as trophies to take to their vaults finds (not things, but rather people) to which they are relatively indifferent, but are very dear to locals.

28Local scholars and officials, on the other hand, saw the same archaeologists as people hired by local institutions to study the local past, with the results of their work being stored in local museums. From this point of view, everything was initially under control. These people were simply angered by the fact that the protesters could not understand that it was Ossetians who were interested in these excavations. In turn, their traditionalist opponents suspected that local elites, pursuing their own narrow practical interests, would make any deal with outsiders. One can see these confrontations in terms of two logics: anti-colonial and nationalist (Nilsson Stutz, 2013: 6–10). They are usually applied to different situations, but here, as in many other applications of non-Western postcolonial critique, they worked simultaneously (sometimes even in one person’s speech).

29There is another important aspect of this story that complicates and nuances the interpretation of these events from a postcolonial perspective. The fact is that the Nuzal villagers themselves did not protest the excavations. They took a keen interest in the work of the archaeologists and even helped them. Obviously, they did not see their relatives in the graves being uncovered: they were resting in peace in the neighbouring cemetery. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that the works at the burial ground were carried out quietly for a month until traditionalists living in Vladikavkaz learnt about them. It was for them that the excavated burial ground turned out to be an ancestral cemetery. Thus, this anti-colonial protest was articulated by the leaders of ethno-religious revivalism, not by local residents. And if the latter had no desire or ability to recognise sacrilege in the actions of archaeologists, the former had quite mastered these interpretative techniques and were able to express their indignation in the public field, as they had long been accustomed to polemics with both Orthodox speakers and representatives of the local intellectual establishment. In this polemic, one of the most pivotal points is the demand of traditionalists for the right to publicly interpret the actions of researchers, in our case archaeologists. Here is how Alan, a member of a traditionalist religious organisation who participated in a public polemic on October 15, 2020 at the North Ossetian Institute for Humanities and Social Studies, formulated this demand:

When archaeology as a science violates some ethical norms (I mean now the mentality of our people, the attitude to cemeteries and to their ancestors), if this line is crossed by an archaeologist, then he ceases to be a scientific worker, but a grave desecrator.... This is the opinion of the participants of our movement.

30Although this statement was presented as “just one opinion,” many Ossetian archaeologists and historians present at this discussion, as I was told later, felt that these words seriously threatened their status as experts.

31As we can see, the tensions in society were very serious. Many scholars, officials, journalists and activists from a variety of movements and organizations took part. Some local experts said irritably that the traditionalists, being deeply ignorant people, hate archaeology and academic science in general, shaming their people and the republic. The traditionalists, faced on the one hand with the fact that their demands to stop the excavations were not legitimate from the point of view of Russian legislation and, on the other, with the resistance of the political and cultural elite of North Ossetia to their cause, decided not to give up. At this stage, their protest was expressed in terms of a tough demand to return the bones that the archaeologists found in the burial ground to the same place and bury them in accordance with (contemporary) Ossetian burial rituals. They hoped that by insisting that the people buried in the ancient cemetery were not Christians, they would call into question the Christian status of the chapel itself.

32To make their claims more legitimate, the traditionalists explained that, for them, the world is arranged differently from the world of the archaeologists and, in general, that of the modernized elite. To put it in the language of current cultural anthropology, they explained that they have their own ontology. Discursively, these ideas were framed in terms of defending the Ossetian ethnic religion and the religious feelings of its followers.

33One of the representatives of the traditionalist milieu who decided to continue to resent the excavations described his feelings in a video message on YouTube. A man of about forty-five years of age, he presents himself as a philosopher and bears the typical “Western” name Arthur, which he writes as Art-Khur (“burning sun” in Ossetian), suggesting a peculiar local etymology. Art-Khur also officially changed his surname to Arthuron (“solar fire,” the name of the sun god from the reconstructed ancient Ossetian pantheon). Here is what he said in his video address to the Ossetian people:

Nuzal is the graves of our ancestors. We have a royal cemetery. You could say it’s one of the last shards of our history. One of the last fragments that show we had our own state, that we are a great nation. We have it in our genes that we had kings, we had statehood. It seems to me that to touch this cemetery is blasphemy. For any Ossetian it is blasphemy.... I think it was kind of the last stronghold, the last point. I think that no Ossetian can live indifferently, watching what is happening. […] This is barbarism. They do not leave us any other chance. For example, for me... I was pinned to the wall, not even to the wall, but to the cliff. If I take a step back now, only shame and death await me from behind. Nothing else awaits me. What’s the point of living then? (“Raskopki v #Nuzale i Iron #Ag’dau…,” 2020)

34The speaker states that he is very acutely experiencing the feelings that every Ossetian should be experiencing in such situations. He feels insulted, which leads him to such despair that he sees no possibility of continuing his existence. His social and personal identity is virtually equal to his ethnic (and religious) identity.

35Two points are important for us here. First, the nation (or ethnic group) is presented as an emotional community. As Barbara Rosenwein writes, “I postulate the existence of ‘emotional communities’: groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value—or devalue—the same or related emotions” (Rosenwein, 2006: 2). In our case study, a person who describes his emotions and those of his fellows as normative and, more importantly, natural, generated by his very nature, does not simply belong to an emotional community. He goes further by framing this ethnic group as an emotional community.

36Second, Art-Khur publicly displays his scorned feelings. By doing so, he in a sense violates the traditional norms of behaviour that prescribe men not to show their feelings in public. The cultural norm of strong self-restraint is expressed by the Ossetian concept of Iron Æfsarm, which is usually translated as “Ossetian modesty.” So, for example, a shocking violation of this principle is considered to be a public declaration of love and a marriage proposal made in a restaurant.

37Characteristically, Art-Khur spoke about his feelings as an Ossetian, not as a believer. His fellow Ossetian video blogger Alan Mamiev, a man in his early 40s, chose a different line of argument, saying that the excavations were a crime against the Ossetian ethnic religion. By doing so, he presented the traditionalists’ arguments through respectable legal language already familiar to Russian legal culture from the article of the criminal code “On Insulting Religious Feelings” introduced in 2013 (Antonov and Samokhina, 2015). In doing so, he attempted to present the entire nativist project as a thoroughgoing religion with real followers. What made them real was their ability to feel insulted, a feeling that Orthodox Christians and Muslims were already displaying in Russian courtrooms with the same goal of making their religious communities more visible in public space.

Relics, Energies and Metaphysical Geopolitics

38Alan Mamiev is well known in Ossetia, and not only in the traditionalist milieu. He has become known as a political analyst who adheres to a leftist ideology based on nostalgia for the Soviet system and as a volunteer fighter in Donbas in 2014–2016. He has a keen interest in esotericism and now sells self-development courses on social media. Mamiev was among the men who came to the excavation site in Nuzal to stop the works. Soon after he plunged with great enthusiasm into the polemic thriving on social media, Instagram in particular. He had long tried to promote the idea that Ossetians and their ancestors, on the one hand, and the followers of Abrahamic religions and people of modern westernized societies in general, on the other, belong to completely different civilizations. He has tirelessly argued that they have diametrically opposed values and ethics.

39This time, Mamiev’s arguments were different. First, he claimed that the people buried near the chapel in Nuzal are, for him and his associates, saints whose remains are relics that should not be touched by outsiders:

Only their ancestors are saints to Ossetians according to Æhdau [the traditional way of life of Ossetians]. Do you understand? And there [in the burial ground] are not just ancestors. The ancestors of the most part of Ossetian modern surnames were buried there, in this cemetery. These are their relics. And in this sense, for representatives of the Ossetian traditional religion, the relics buried in Nuzal are the same as Orthodox relics lying in a church. They are respected remains of respected people. Orthodoxy has its own but here we have ours. These are our direct ancestors. Do you see what else the difference is? Not just some people who lived somewhere in Greece, in Rome… [i.e., Christian saints]. [We have] a direct blood [connection] to most modern Ossetians ancestors. Naturally, there was a great, violent indignation of the people... well, part of the people, so to speak, the public, that these remains began to be extracted. (“Bor’ba za istoriiu #Alanii,” 2020)

40From this point of view, uncovering the graves of ancestors is just as blasphemous as desecrating the relics of Christian saints:

They [the archaeologists] have permission, fine. But the essence of what is happening does not change. These are still our ancestors. And they are still digging them up. Under the Soviets, the Bolsheviks also had permission to turn churches into stables. There was such permission, wasn’t there? There was. And there were laws. And relics were collected, bones were bagged and thrown away. There are documentaries about it. This all also happened. And everything was also by the law, by the law of that time, the law of war communism [voennogo kommunisma]. And so? And now you’re saying it was bad. So, we’re saying it wasn’t very good either.... Because for us these are our ancestors, these are holy relics. (ibid.)

41A little later in this speech, he translates his thought into the language of modern Russian legislation: “For us they are saints, and what is happening there now is an offense to the feelings of believers, i.e., us” (ibid.).

42Rather paradoxically, here Mamiev draws parallels with the veneration of relics of saints by Orthodox believers, which Ossetian traditionalists usually ridicule bitterly and present as wild superstition. But in this context, these alien practices become a source of legitimation for the traditionalist’s own claims and an explanation of Mamiev’s emotions.

43One more line of reasoning connects the beginning of the excavations in Nuzal with international political events. Mamiev argued that the excavations in Nuzal prompted a series of wars in the Caucasus. This logic borrows its narrative scheme from the historical legend of the opening of Tamerlane’s tomb in 1941; this opening is said to have released the spirit of the great conqueror and caused the war between the USSR and Nazi Germany. In Mamiev’s explanatory construction, the cause-and-effect relationship of the events is likened to the work of laws of nature (or the universe) inaccessible to common people:

My friends who live in Armenia call me and say ... “Is this, they say, really an Alanian lineage?” I say, “Yes.” They say, “This is very strange.” I say, “Why?” [They ask:] “And when did they start opening up the first burials?” I say, “Honestly, I don’t know. I can’t tell by the dates. But here they started excavating at the end of August. Maybe in the middle of September, maybe at the beginning, God knows.” He says, “Very strange. About the same time our Armenians and Azerbaijanis started fighting, the first flare-ups here. The first outbursts had already started then. The dates were roughly the same.” I said, “And why do you think it might be related?” Well, he says, “You know what these kinds of graves are and what happens when they are opened?” I realize you’re going to accuse me of all sorts of scary things now, but I’ll make a deal first. Hear me out. So, we talked about this whole thing. These people are not stupid, they also have higher education, PhDs and doctorates. These are comrades who understand how it works, who live in Armenia, in Nagorno-Karabakh itself. That was the first sign for me. (“Raskopki tsarskogo alanskogo mogil’nika roda #Tsarazonta,” 2020)

44Finally, the third narrative links the excavations to threatening social cataclysms in Ossetia (including epidemics—it was 2020, after all). Alan Mamiev is inspired in this speech by notions of “power places,” from which not only individuals but also entire nations derive their vital energy. Talking about the secret motives of those who organised excavations in Nuzal, he says that these excavations are a “blow to the egregore” of Ossetia and even the whole of Russia, destroying the most important “energy point” on which the strength of the entire nation is based.

45After the Nuzal excavation ended, Mamiev explained the essence of these events in a vivid discourse on the current processes taking place throughout the world. In his account, New Age notions of ancient monuments as places of power (Timothy and Conover, 2006: 144) joined nationalist eschatology and theories of a global conspiracy of the elites:

• 6 In his other argument, the narrative of sacrilege is directly inspired by the story of the so-call (...)

Capturing these sacred spots is one of the strategic objectives for people like Herman Gref [head of one of the powerful Russian banking corporations]. Their task, in addition to seizing the land, is to block the action of the sacred places and to start using this energy for their own purposes.... The war is not just on an economic level. It takes place on the sacred, metaphysical level. And these people, no matter what, must ... stop these places from working or make them work for them.... These are not just people. I would like to say: [they are] black magicians.... These places of power, they have to be either blocked, destroyed, or redirected to their advantage. Since they [these invaders] are dark, since they are dark, they cannot draw on this energy; accordingly, they [the sacred places] must be destroyed. (“#Altaj i #Alaniya dva sakral’nykh centra #Evrazii,” 2021)6

46The origins of the ontologies that the Ossetian traditionalist intellectual uses to claim the burial site can be found in late modern narrative schemes deriving from a combination of Western esotericism (in its New Age version), inverted concepts taken from dominant religious traditions and ontologies of other ethnic groups undergoing postcolonial reflection.

Overt Competition and Covert Rivalry

47Why did Alan Mamiev take such an active part in this story? After all, until this moment he had not demonstrated his involvement in traditionalist public actions, limiting himself to theoretical speculations about modern psychology and the parapsychology of religion in connection with actual political processes. An answer can be found in Jeanne Favret-Saada’s article dealing with offenses to “religious feelings”:

In fact, this struggle for one-upmanship is an ordinary dimension of situations of devotional protest-even if the mass media ... are generally unable to realize this. By becoming vocal against impious artists [excavations], groups of devotees attempt to show the religious masses the superiority of their religious zeal: they show they are not afraid to stand against state power... With this in mind, we may say that any conflict on [the excavations] that confronts devotional coteries with non-devotees and nonbelievers presupposes a prior competition among religious groups for the adhesion of religious masses. (Favret-Saada, 2016: 34)

48In other words, the primary audience of the person or persons who publicly declare their hurt religious feelings is not the opponents they seem to be addressing, but their potential supporters, for whose attention and loyalty they are vying. These speakers, in proclaiming their struggle against enemy power and their willingness to confront it, are struggling their competitors within the group for attention, respect, and other more material resources.

49Following this analysis, to present himself as a particularly committed believer, Mamiev portrayed himself as someone who was ready to come into conflict with the dominant forces in society. Additionally, he shows his particular sensitivity and adherence to principle in issues of loyalty, in our case, to the ethnic tradition (Æhdau) and to doctrinal and ritual institutions. By claiming his willingness to sacrifice himself and his acute ability to recognize threats to social values in the actions of others and to respond vigorously to those threats, he enters into competition with other activists from this or similar movements. This position is pretty understandable: Alan Mamiev constantly faces the problem that his version (vision) of the traditional Ossetian faith is not taken seriously by other traditionalists and, above all, by those of them who have real power in the registered communities of this religion. Their skepticism can be explained by Mamiev’s particular interpretation of the prospects of Ossetian religious traditionalism. He claims that he does much to bring Ossetian spiritual culture closer to modern man. This involves translating the realities of local beliefs and practices into New Age language and establishing connections with non-Ossetian nativist groups and projects, such as the contemporary Russian pagan activist Igor Poluichik’s “Magic Army of Rus’” and the New Age Youtube canal “Etot moment” (This Moment). In conversations with me, several traditionalist intellectuals ironically called him an esotericist who turns an ancient Indo-European faith into “entertainment for exalted ladies.”

51Mamiev’s involvement in solving the main problem associated with the excavations in Nuzal—the return of the remains found by archaeologists to their original location—was particularly vivid and widely publicized by him on social networks. As I said, the initial message calling to stop the excavations was very concerned about where the bones found in the burial ground had gone and what would happen to them next. The mission of the traditionalists was to have these bones reburied, preferably in the same graves. The latter could not be done, because any excavation destroys the archaeological site. However, the prospect of burying these bones in a special common grave not far from the Nuzal chapel seemed very attractive to the initiators of the reburial project. It implied a public ritual and the de facto creation by the traditionalists of a new national shrine, one which the ROC would not be able to control.

52According to the rules followed by Russia’s archeologists, the bones had to be reburied one way or another. When the reburial took place at the very end of December 2020, most Ossetian participants in this action learned about it from Mamiev’s post on Instagram. As a result, there is a widespread idea in Ossetia that the reburial was the result of Mamiev’s (media) activities. In urging compatriots to gather in Nuzal, he said, among other things:

We will hold this reburial. The elders will come, pray and do everything necessary—the ceremony [will be] according to our traditional religion. We won’t consider any other options, funeral services or anything else. Why? Because we consulted with archaeologists, and the archaeologists said that no symbolism was found in these graves, neither Islamic, nor Jewish or Christian. Accordingly, these were people who lived in our traditional culture, and we will bury them according to the same customs. (“Data perezakhoroneniya v s. Nuzal,” 2020)

53Mamiev himself went to Nuzal to participate directly in the restoration of justice after the desecration of the ancestors’ graves. About 150 people, mostly young men, arrived in Nuzal. Some young Ossetian politicians and leaders of traditionalist organizations were present. The remains of each of the approximately 200 people found during the excavations were placed in small wooden boxes up to half a meter long, resembling small coffins and specially made for this reburial. These boxes were placed adjacent to each other in concrete boxes, somewhat resembling the stone boxes in which these bones were buried, and were closed from above with concrete slabs before being covered with earth. Although this method of burial somewhat resembled the traditional one, it looked very peculiar and, one might say, non-ritual. Several people who took an active part in this event could not remember anything they associated with Ossetian funeral rites. Ossetia learned of the victory of the traditionalists over the Orthodox in the battle for Nuzal from the lips of Alan Mamiev, who ended his speech, delivered on video, with the (self-)ironic remark: “This is the magic power of Instagram” (“Alan Mamiev rasskazal o tom…,” 2020).

54Two weeks after the reburial of the remains, Alan Mamiev and his comrades released a special video in which they summarized the “scientific” results of the excavations, claiming one more time that the archaeologists, about whom they spoke with respect this time, had not found any Christian symbols in this burial site. In this video, Mamiev returned to his favorite theme of attempts by dark forces to take possession of “sacred, energetic places.” New details had emerged:

These places are being hunted. During World War II, the Ahnenerbe did this. The SS division “Brandenburg” was rushing here. They were rushing into the mountains. But there is no gold, no diamonds, no oil in Ossetia. But everyone is rushing here for some reason.... Not everybody is eager to get to Grozny’s oil. Some, let’s say, more advanced fellows in this world, they’re after these sacred places. And what we see now is an attempt to squeeze us as a people out from these sacred spots. (Obrashchenie k molodyozhi…,” 2021)

55With the Nuzal affair, Mamiev was indeed able to gain public credibility precisely as a leader of traditionalist activism, capable of organizing public action and with merit to the nativist project by his involvement in the conflict over the excavation. His triumph was quite understandable—not only did his actions draw the attention of many residents of the republic who in one way or another support the religious nativist project. Much more importantly, his interpretations of the sacred nature of local historical monuments, his narrative about the struggle around them and its hidden mechanisms and his ability to demonstrate his heightened sensitivity to the insulted ethno-religious feelings of the Ossetians raised the public profile of both the entire nativist project and his personal reputation as an activist and religious expert. Later, he used this resource when he invited his comrades to conduct the rituals he had created, presented as restored Aryan traditions. But that is another story.

Concluding Remarks

56Across the Russian Federation, the ROC is undertaking all possible projects to mark urban and rural localities as Orthodox, that is, as a legitimate space for their activities and institutional dominance. There are such projects in North Ossetia. New churches and chapels continue to be built. Other aspects of this policy are aimed at making the history of Ossetians Orthodox: Orthodox posters on huge street billboards show portraits of the missionary priests who spread Orthodoxy among the Ossetians in the nineteenth century. According to the authors of this campaign, the images of ancient village churches are visual proofs that this land, and therefore the people who lived on it, have always been Orthodox.

57As we saw, despite the achievements of the traditionalists, the chapel in the village of Nuzal has remained under the control of the local Orthodox diocese. However, in a context where the Church has no monopoly on the creation of a public narrative about the past of an ethno-political entity, its efforts have pushed supporters of other views of Orthodoxy and religion in general to create alternative interpretations of history and present them in public.

58In this case study, the leaders of the diocese, faced with strong opposition to expanding its presence around a national shrine, have withdrawn from the further memorialisation of Nuzal’s Christian past, allowing those who do not see their ancestors as Christians to hold commemorative events. In this respect, it is very typical that none of the local priests ever thought of holding a memorial service over the remains of the Ossetian ancestors found by archaeologists, although this practice is widespread in today’s Russia. The bones of their seemingly forgotten (in fact, newly found) ancestors were taken care of by traditionalists, who were ready to work with the image of “blood and soil” embodied materially in these nameless bodies. The Orthodox were left with an ancient architectural structure handed over to them by the Russian state, decorated with beautiful frescoes but otherwise empty.

59Meanwhile, next to the Nuzal chapel, a new shrine has appeared. It, too, is associated with the memory of the medieval state of Ossetian ancestors, however without any Orthodox Christian symbols. A modest stone with an inscription in Ossetian is supposed to be placed on it. It has no obvious religious meaning, but it allows one to perform the customary gesture of touching a coffin or grave with one’s hand as a sign of farewell to the deceased: “Kæj fænda, uymæn kuyd ua jæ bon bacæuyn æmæ uycy cyrtyl jæ khux aværyn” (Whoever wants, let him come and touch this tombstone with his hand). Soon after this reburial, projects were started in Ossetia for a large, opulent memorial on this site. According to the sketches I saw, there will be no Christian symbols there.

60Whether this monument will be built is not known. It will be a long and complicated process. But the traditionalists expect it to become a place of remembrance where members of the ethnic Ossetian religion can come to honor their glorious non-Christian ancestors and feel again like the emotional community that united in the fall of 2020 to resist a system that can unceremoniously disturb “lovely bones,” turning them from ancestors into the numbered objects of archaeological collections stored in the dark vaults of imperial museums.