Untitled

102 THE EXPLORATION OF THE CAUCASUS
they formed villages. These consist of two-storied stone houses,
with flat wooden roofs and balconies, not altogether unlike those
found in many of the ruder hamlets of the Italian Alps. In each
of the old fortress -farms lived a family, or genf^, who held all
property, even their personal earnings, in common. They owned
slaves, prisoners taken in war or the offspring of female captives.
Blood-revenge produced terrible feuds between the clans, and it
is only in comparatively recent times that crimes have been allowed
to be atoned for by payments in cattle.
Funeral feasts form a great pai't of Ossete religion. In Ossetia a
man has to feed not only his de.scendants but his departed ancestors.
There is no greater insult to an Ossete than to tell him that '
'
dead are ! hungry They have no less than ten Feasts of the Dead,
some of which last several days, in their calendar. By a pious
fiction the food consumed is held to benefit not him who eats but
him in whose honour it is eaten ; thus greediness may cloak itself
in filial piety. The prayer that is recited with the New-Year
offering to the departed is not without local colour and character :
'
May he be at peace and may his grave be undisturbed ; may he
be famous among the dead, so that none may have power over his
sustenance, and that it may reach him untouched and be his for
ever, that increasing it may multiply as long as the rocks fall
down our mountains and the rivers roll over the plains, neither
groMdng mouldy in summer nor being frozen in winter ; and may
he divide it according to his goodwill among such of the dead
as have no food.' The Ossete idea of a future world is clearly
one where '
daily
bread '
still continues the first and chief care.
It would take too long to repeat the various and interesting
details given by Professor Kovalevsky of Ossete rites and customs,
their peculiar i-everence for sacred trees and groves, for the hearth
and the great chain that holds the cooking-caldron, their beliefs
in the visits interchanged between the visible and the invisible
world, in heroes who return to fight, like Castor and Pollux, side
by side with the living.
It is, I think, impossible not to recognise
that we are here in the atmosphere from which classical legends
sprang, among stay-at-home relations of the more brilliant people
his