Digor Erotic

The Digor are one of the two halves of the Ossetian people, and the line between them and the Iron majority is drawn first in speech. Both speak Ossetian, the only surviving language of the Scythian and Sarmatian branch of Iranian, left behind in a Caucasus of Turkic, Circassian, Nakh and Kartvelian neighbors. Digor is the conservative half. Where Iron softened its old velars, Digor kept them, so a girl is kizgæ in Digor and chyzg in Iron, and that one sound carries most of the long argument over whether Digor is a dialect or a language in its own right. The question is not settled and it is not purely linguistic. Their country is Digoria, the upper valley of the Urukh in the western districts of North Ossetia-Alania: glacier water, alpine pasture, and villages built in stone up the sides of the gorge. At Galiat and Khanaz the old settlements still stand in tiers, houses stacked so that one roof is the next one's yard, with towers and family crypts among them.

The mountains are where the Digor ended up, not where they started. The Alans held the northern plains until the Mongols and then Timur broke them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the survivors went up the gorges. What followed in Digoria followed nowhere else in Ossetia in quite the same form. Kabardian neighbors brought two things across the passes: a feudal aristocracy, the badilyata, who traced themselves to an incomer and ruled over the valley's dependent classes, and Sunni Islam, which took hold here while the Iron gorges leaned Orthodox. Muslim Digor left for Ottoman territory in the nineteenth century and their descendants are in Turkey still; the Digor resettled around Mozdok were baptized and stayed. Under all of it runs the older Ossetian faith: the shrines called dzuar, the feast-prayer called kuvd, the three pies and the three-legged table, the beer that Ossetians will tell you the Narts invented, and the summer gathering at Zadalesk for the woman remembered for hiding Alan children from Timur's men. Soviet policy treated Digor distinctness as a problem, abolished the Digor literary standard in 1937 and broke the writers who defended it. The standard came back, and North Ossetia's constitution now names Iron and Digor together as the state language. Most Digor call themselves Ossetians. They also call themselves Digoron, and see no contradiction in it.