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The Imperiia Project: a spatial history of the Russian Empire

I wondered how she knew these things

... but then I noticed the weathered guidebook lodged between her elbow and the ship's rail. She had been reading a guide published in 1862. And not just any guide. It was the first-of-its-kind guidebook to Russian river travel. And it was published by the Samolet Steam Company - the very company operating the ship on which we are sailing.

The Volga, from Tver to Astrakhan is a pretty thing. It is graced with dozens of lithograph illustrations and sketches by one of the finest artists of the day, Aleksey Petrovich Bogolyubov, who just happened to be sailing the Volga for another purpose entirely, having been commissioned by the Naval Ministry to collaborate on a hydrographical atlas of the Caspian Sea. When they found out, Samolet asked Bogolyubov to document the towns and landscapes along the route (in such a way that they appeared picturesque, I imagine).

Which he did. And that is how I came across this picture of Tscheboksari as it was half a century ago, in 1862.

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Tcheboksari There are curiosities everywhere, should one care to look.

Should one know where to look.

I knew only because a fellow passenger took my elbow and guided my eye and whispered in my ear about churches built without architects, a leaning tower, piers that launch some 300 ships each year, and ancient earthworks running down to the Volga - humble survivors of a fire that leveled even fortified walls at the end of the seventeenth century. She told me of an icon of the Virgin Mother of God known to have put an end to plague and cholera, and of the life-sized wooden image of Saint Nicholas the Wonder-Worker in a chapel of the Trinity Monastery. An image with the power to resolve any argument for no guilty party - Chuvash, Tatar, Cheremis, or Russian, baptized or otherwise - can bear to swear an oath in its presence.

We were some 16 miles downriver before the tolling of the cathedral bell died away on the wind.

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