Alpan is the fire-and-lightning god of the Lezgic-speaking peoples of the eastern Caucasus, among whom the Tsakhur are counted. His name is embedded in the everyday Lezgic word for lightning, tsailapan, literally the flash of Alpan's fire, and a lightning strike was read as his personal touch: places and people he struck were held sacred rather than merely damaged, and mourning for one killed by lightning was suppressed or replaced by celebration. The same numinous force animated the domestic hearth, whose flame was protected by strict prohibitions against defilement. Sources differ on the deity's antiquity and on whether the name preserves a pre-Christian cult of Caucasian Albania; ethnographers record the belief as a shared substratum of the Lezgic complex rather than a cult peculiar to any single community.