Imagining the Arab-Ottoman World in Modern Russia: Narratives of Russian Pilgrims to the Holy Land of Christianity (16th-18th Centuries)

The Russian experience in the Middle East left a fascinating record in a wealth of travel accounts of the Arab-Ottoman world. Russian pilgrims' narratives contributed in Russia towards knowledge about the Middle East from the pre-modern era when they were a major source of information about the area. From the sixteenth century, the scope of the pilgrims' interest became wider and more versatile. Nearly all Russian pilgrims who left written travel accounts concentrated not only on the customary phenomena related to pilgrimage but they also paid tribute, albeit in various degrees, to secular issues. Pilgrims' writings appealed to all strata of Russian society as "edifying reading" about the Holy Land and as entertaining reading aimed at stirring readers' curiosity about the alien world outside their homeland's boundaries. This literature contributed in Russia towards the formation of the image of the Orient: pilgrims eagerly supplied readers with first-hand evidence about the realia of the Arab-Ottoman world and they also proliferated Orientalist myths and stereotypes.