The Caucasus connection

Deep in the Caucasus mountains of southern Russia, near war-torn Chechnya, a tribe known as the Ossetians share many cultural…

Deep in the Caucasus mountains of southern Russia, near war-torn Chechnya, a tribe known as the Ossetians share many cultural and social similarities with the Irish. Belinda Jackson visits the homeland of thisancient race who may be the original Celts.

I stare at the dead woman's hairpin. Was she my cousin? The pin is certainly most familiar, its two concentric Celtic spirals like anything you'd buy from the hawkers on O'Connell Street bridge. Even though the pin is now 2,100 years old, and I'm looking at it in a remote town in southern Russia, just 50 miles from Chechnya, the trail that may link us is not yet cold.

"But we are cousins," insists Larissa, on learning of my Irish roots.

Larissa is Ossetian, one of an ancient tribe that has lived in the soaring Caucasus mountains on the Russian-Georgian border for thousands of years. They are, she maintains, of the original Celts.

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Her assertion of kinship follows the theory that modern-day Ossetians are a mix of warlike, horse-mad Scythians and another, more peaceful tribe, the Sarmatian-Alans, who later drifted, or were thrust westward, their blood mingling with that of the Celts. It is a theory supported by some of the big names in Celtic history, such as Gerhard Herm, author of the seminal work, The Celts, and Celtic art writers Lloyd and Jennifer Laing.

The texts tell that from the 7th century BC, Scythian horsemen pushed out from their central Asian strongholds, leaving, as their calling card, some particularly gruesome practices - echoed later in Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Celts - including tearing off the bloody heads of their defeated enemies, thus ensnaring their strength as the foe's lifeblood ebbed.

Four centuries later, the Scythians were forced further west by the mysterious Sarmatians, who also temporarily halted in the Caucasus, pausing to mix with the Scythians to become the forefathers of today's Ossetians before continuing their westward pilgrimage in the great migration of peoples, a journey which involved brawling with the Roman Empire and founding Alani states as far afield as Orleans in France and North Africa.

From this ancient history, the Ossetians survived in their mountain isolation, their distinct identity and Indo-Iranian language intact, but its influence traceable.

In Vladikavkas, the capital of the state of North Ossetia, Larissa speaks Russian as well as her native Ossetian, the tongue of her Scythian forebears, which when first discovered in 341AD used the Greek alphabet, and has since alternated between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.

There are two dialects, Digor and the more popular Iron, perhaps a corruption of the older name for Indo-Iranian peoples, "Aryan", its words finding their way onto our very tongues.

For example, she , in Ossetian, where "don" is the word for water, the Russian River Don flows into the Black Sea, London translates as "staying water" and Croydon, south of the city, where Celtic tribes were known to have lived, means "mill on water". The traditional Ossetian names of Fatima and Alan can be heard on the streets of both Dublin and Vladikavkas today.

These Ossetian words possibly entered the British Isles as the Alani, who learned from the Huns their tradition of binding their children's skulls to produce a deformed egg-shaped head, paid for their warrior ways by enslavement to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who vanquished them with the result that some migrated to northern England.

It is estimated that there are just 600,000 people of this tiny, ancient race living in the former USSR today, spread on either side of the Russian-Georgian border, while Turkey also has a small Ossetian population. They are renowned in archaeological circles for their skilled, intricate metal jewellery and weaponry, striking in its stylised depiction of animals.

They learned their Scythian ancestors' reverence of horses, another trait shared with the Celts, and in the first millennium BC garnished belt buckles with the form of a beloved horse in full gallop, or lavished stags' heads across a breast pin in the form of a battle-axe, the sort of designs that have led some historians to declare they birthed medieval animal-based heraldry.

Another buckle recalls a hunting scene, dogs bringing down a stag, its antlers curled in a complicated geometric knot. It is the same elegant, mathematical series of swirls and curves that I see later tattooed around a young Ossetian patriot's slim wrist, though at first I mistook her for a devotee of Irish design.

"The spiral ornament travelled along the trade-routes through Europe," wrote Donald A. Mackenzie as early as 1917. In his book, Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe, he stated that the distinctive spiral rings that many define as being intrinsically Irish have been unearthed in Spanish tombs, on the landbridges that link Scandinavia to mainland Europe, and join our own far western isles to that same land mass via the ancient pathways of the Rhone and Danube valley.

"Eastward from the Danubian area (the spiral design) penetrated as far as Koban in Russian Armenia, between the Caspian and Black Seas, where it occurs on objects taken from a prehistoric cemetery," he added. Later, in 1977, Michael Herity and George Eogan, authors of Ireland In Prehistory, tipped their hats to the influences on Celtic art, which they say blended a variety of styles including Oriental and Greek as well as Scythian.

Alongside the Celtic-style jewellery lie 2,000-year-old beer barrels, torcs and daggers engraved with ram's horns, symbolising fertility and power. The lucky ram has won its escape as the choice animal of sacrifice, the unfortunate ox finding itself on the altar at weddings and funerals in this region of three religions: Orthodox Christian, Muslim, and the far older, animistic pagan religion of the Ossetians.

Propped against the displays are old wooden totem poles carved from the revered oak; the Celts also made totem poles, and in Celtic folklore, the oak is the sacred tree of the druids.

Much of the material is from Ossetian burial grounds even higher in the mountains that surpass 15,000 feet, the most spectacular being the necropolis near Dargavs. A collection of tiny beehive huts litters the "town of the dead", where families would bring their dying relatives for their final journey; the curious stone constructions are reminiscent of monks' huts in Co Kerry.

The tired bones of their ancestors, laid in their boat-shaped coffins, glisten white between the shifting stones today, although parts of the region were recently devastated by a massive glacier slide.

At the point where the Caucasus meets the Black Sea, some 600km west of Vladikavkas, these huts of the dead give way to dolmens, whose stone slabs would not look out of place on an Irish golf course. From the stones stare the symbols of a pre-Christian harvest celebration, with a male goat - or Puck, another symbol of fertility - sending thoughts back down to Kerry and Kilorglin's annual Puck Fair, presided over each year by one of those same, blank-eyed creatures.

Vladikavkas was on the tourist trail until the eruption of civil war in 1992, and the ongoing Russo-Chechen conflict keeps all but the intrepid away from North Ossetia, while the mirror state of South Ossetia, in neighbouring Georgia, has its own troubles as it tries to succeed as an independent republic amid what many Georgians believe is a Russian plot to destabilise their tiny country.

As a result, tourists are still a rarity, and so when yet another band of museum curators from the Dom Kultury, or House of Culture, overhears our English, they immediately adopt us.

And it is here we learn of yet another similarity between Irish Celts and their Ossetian cousins: the warmth of their hospitality and their incredible ability to consume alcohol. We are embraced, literally, with a rare and overwhelming generosity, the sort of gesture for which Ireland, the land of the welcomes, was once famous.

If the idea of an Irish-Ossetian link is but a series of merecoincidences, then this people's warmth and openness gives desire enough to become a long-lost sister or brother.

We are seated at a round table, a standard feature in Ossetian households and a symbol of friendship that has its links with Camelot and King Arthur, whose story of the sword Excalibur was recently traced back to an Ossetian legend. According to Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor, the legend was brought to England by the Alani, who were also one of the many Caucasian people to revere the pre-Christian St George as the god of the mountains and patron of all men.

And so, in the traditional manner, with tiny, potent glasses of sweet vodka, and led by the tamada or toastmaster, we toast our ancestors, our families, our health, our friendship, and then, one by one, each person sings. Gentle, traditional songs in mellow minor keys, another of these talented people occasionally joining in to offer their perfectly pitched harmony. A spot of sean nós, anyone?