132 Chapter Four
of the Sacrifice, the festival marking the end of the hajj, fell on a Friday, so
crowds were expected to be larger than usual—Saidazimbaev estimated at least
15,000. With construction of his “Muslim train station” already under way in
Tashkent, in April he traveled to Samara and Penza to negotiate with local
authorities to construct similar facilities there.^55 In early June, he returned to
St. Petersburg for a meeting with Russian railroad representatives. At this
meeting, organized by the minister of transport, he got the representatives to
designate 1,000 third-class train cars for use as hajj cars along the fourteen
different rail lines Russia’s hajj pilgrims typically used. He also worked with
them to develop a plan and a schedule for “direct”—transfer-free (besperesa-
dochnyi)—service for pilgrims, to make transport faster and more orderly.^56
Arriving in Odessa later that month, Saidazimbaev faced obstacles to his
plan. Contrary to what he had told the Volunteer Fleet back in February, he did
not have a building already under construction in Odessa to lodge hajj pil-
grims, and did not even own land there. In fact, it seems likely that Saidazim-
baev had never been to Odessa before. He had no political connections in the
city, was completely unknown, even within the small Muslim community, and
seems to have been unfamiliar with its already established and complex local
hajj industry. His efforts, with the backing of the Ministry of Finance, to lease a
plot of land in the port immediately caused controversy among local officials,
both because they had no idea who he was and because there was already a
project under way to build a hajj complex.^57
Odessa’s city-governor, I. N. Tolmachev, either had not received the an-
nouncement about Saidazimbaev’s appointment as hajj director or had cho-
sen to ignore it. Whatever the case, in June 1908 he was busy helping the local
businessman and retired ship captain Petr Gurzhi build a facility for hajj pil-
grims in Odessa’s port. Gurzhi was an obvious choice for this job. For several
years he had been involved in chartering ships to transport pilgrims. The previ-
ous year, in response to the sudden surge of hajj traffic through the city, Tol-
machev had put him in charge of organizing lodging and transport for hajj
pilgrims. More than 10,000 pilgrims had flooded the city in the fall of 1907, the
highest number ever reported, all arriving within a three-month period.^58 Gur-
zhi had managed to house nearly all of them in city hotels and private homes,
but city sanitary officials struggled to track them down to screen them for dis-
ease. To recall, at the end of the season, Gurzhi urged Tolmachev to support
construction of a special building for hajj pilgrims in the city. Centralizing pil-
grims in a single facility, he argued, would reduce the risks of a cholera epi-
demic in Odessa.^59