State, Religion and ChuRCh (2015) 2(1): 75 – 105. 75 Sergei Shtyrkov Orthodox Traditionalism in the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania: The Ethnicization of Religion as the “Internal Mission” of the Russian Orthodox Church Translation by Jan Surer Sergei Shtyrkov — Professor, European University in St. Peters- burg; Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (“Kunstkamera”) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg, Russia). shtyr@eu.spb.ru An especially important concept with which religion has been linked in the public consciousness, and on which it directly depends, remains the concept of tradition. “Traditionalism” is a quality directly related to the characteristics implicitly ascribed to “real” religion: invariabil- ity, orderliness, the ability to provide a model of stability to a chang- ing society, which is subject to rapid, painful transformations, and is thus in need of ideal paradigms of guaranteed stability and histori- cal rootedness. The central focus of this article is the information pol- icy of the structures of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Repub- lic of North Ossetia-Alania. This ‘inculturation’ policy seeks to create an image of the Ossetian people as the natural vessel of an ancient Orthodox culture, inherited from their ancestors, the Alans, who ac- cepted Christianity in the tenth century. This kind of “ethnicization of Orthodoxy” — that is, the efort to overcome the ironclad associ- ative link between the concepts of “Russianness” and “Orthodoxy” in order to present the latter as the “native faith” of non-Russian ethnic groups — represents a marked tendency in some Russian Orthodox eparchies’ religious policy. Keywords: North Ossetia, inculturation, internal mission, tradition- alism, native religion, the Vladikavkaz and Alania Eparchy of the Rus- sian Orthodox Church.