The Alan “gloss” on the margins of the Akathist to Saint Nicholas (the problem of reception)
The study of ethnolinguistic aspects of the reception of the Christian (Byzantine) spiritual tradition by the local (Alan) tradition has become particularly relevant after the recent discovery of Alan medieval marginal glosses. For the first time, this problem of the reception of Christianity by the Alan flock is solved comprehensively and systematically through an appeal to the Akathist to Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker, which contains a characteristic innovation interpreted as a kind of “gloss” to Christian worship. Comparative-historical and structural-semiotic analysis of the Ossetian lexeme kºuvd | kovd ‘ritual feast, collective prayer' allows us to compare it with the Greek λειτουργία ‘common cause; worship'. As a result, it is possible not only to trace both ways of the Alan reception of Christianity, historical-theological and mytho-ritual, but also to reveal itsvery cultural and historical core, going back to the same Proto-Indo-European source as the ancient Greek rite of θεοξένια.