The Survival of Ossetians in Contemporary Turkey

The migration of North Caucasian peoples into Ottoman Anatolia during the early 1860s included some five thousand Muslim Ossetes who settled first in the Sarıkamış district and later moved further west. While today the descendants of these migrants may number as many as 60,000, most now live in the major urban centres of Istanbul and Ankara and have largely become assimilated into modern Turkish society. However, three villages in the Yozgat district east of Ankara, Boyalık, Karabacak and Poyrazlı, have remained Ossetian-speaking up to the present day. This paper explores the circumstances though which the Ossetian language has survived in these villages 160 years after the migration, and what prospects exist for the continuation of a distinct Ossetian communal identity in Turkey.