Holy Places
What can we learn from the geography of monasteries?
There were over 500 monasteries spread across the Russian Empire in the early 19th century. They were holy places: sites of pilgrimage and prayer. They were also microcosms of empire, complete with hierarchy, privilege and obligation, agriculture, industry, and trade. They were architectural monuments built by tsars and saints, supplied by farmers and traders. Some were a stone's throw from the imperial court, others were located on remote islands in the desolate north. Some were older than the Romanov dynasty.The list we digitized for this dashboard dates to 1817 (more about that below), in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and in the reign of Alexander I (1801-1825). Although a few were abolished or destroyed before or during the reign of Alexander, most survived to the end of the imperial period. After 1917 they were abandoned, repurposed, or destroyed by the secularization campaigns of the Communist regime, but many have been restored as working monasteries or protected historical sites. All of which is to say that the stories of these holy places extend well beyond the boundaries of the maps we have produced. We hope you will reconstruct them. And if you do, we want to hear them!
[MAPS TO BE INSTALLED HERE 17 APRIL 2024]
The Source and Why it Matters
The source for this dashboard is a single volume published in 1817. It is called A Description of the Monasteries of the Russian Empire with dates of establishment and class designation, church holidays and commemorations, and an appended list of all cathedral, monastic, and parish churches in the cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, with their dates of construction and associated holidays. That is quite a mouthful. And it is quite a source. Here are 5 things you should know about it.1. The Description flew off the shelves.
The 1817 volume was the 4th edition, and by 1834 the 8th edition had appeared: there was a massive appetite for information about Orthodox sites in 19th century Russia.
2. It is ambitious.
It describes over 500 monasteries in historical and geographical detail.
3. It is not perfectly accurate.
Why? For one thing, it claims to cover the whole territory of the empire and in fact includes monasteries in modern day Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia as far east as Kamchatka. But the boundaries of the empire were constantly changing. In the late 18th century and early 19th century Catherine II and her successors conquered and annexed large portions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Cossack Hetmanate, the Crimean Khanate, Bessarabia, and Finland. They acquired portions of other Ottoman lands, as well as kingdoms and khanates of the Caucasus. Acquiring territory often meant acquiring monasteries.
Even if the geography of the empire hadn't been in flux, the landscape of monasteries was always changing. While monasteries were generally stable fixtures (most had at least one stone church), fire, plague, war, politics, patronage practices, commercial networks, and a host of other factors could lead to the establishment of a new site or the demise of an existing one. News of such changes flowed unevenly from village to capital: it took a lot of effort (and luck) to compile a mountain of knowledge like the Description.
4. It sheds light on cultural life in the Russian Empire.
It was published by Pyotr Ioannikievich Selivanovskii, one of the most famous typographers and book publishers of the 19th century. Selivanovskii established himself during the reign of Catherine II, who not only tolerated but even encouraged book publishing... until she didn't. In 1796 Catherine shut down private presses, but by that time Selivanovskii had already published more than 60 volumes. The admiral of the Black Sea Fleet invited Selivanovskii to Mykolaiv (Nikolaev), where he worked for several years until moving to Moscow. There he ran the Senate press and opened his own press in 1802. He published broadsides during the Napoleonic invasion, works by luminaries such as Lomonosov and Rousseau, as well as almanacs, journals, and... monastery lists.
5. It connects the Russian Empire to international and transnational developments in science.
The Description is a typical object of its time. It is a gazetteer: a list of places with location information, organized alphabetically. The genre was all the rage in Europe and North America, a product of the Enlightenment project of collecting and systematizing information about the known world. Though a few brave souls attempted to compile universal geographical dictionaries, most early gazetteers focused on a single region or topic, such as archaeological sites, market towns, rivers, gardens, mines... or monasteries.
About the Data
How to use the dashboard
Questions to Get you Started
Assets to Take You Further
Cite the Dashboard:
https://imperiia.scalar.fas.harvard.edu/imperiia/relics [date of access].
