14 4 Chapter Four
“Go away!” whenever they approached the gates.^95 In another account, pub-
lished in Nur, a group of Central Asian pilgrims described how they were “sur-
rounded by police and gendarmes” at the Odessa train station, and forced to go
directly to the hajj complex, where they were forbidden to leave. After manag-
ing to escape, they headed to the port in search of steamship tickets but were
surprised to be apprehended by Saidazimbaev’s agent Gurzhi. He had followed
them from the hajj complex and got police officers to force them back to the
“prison.”^96
Pilgrims reported shabby treatment and high prices rather than comfort and
affordability at the hajj complex. They complained about its location in “one of
the bad parts of the city,” and their being packed into it “like herrings.” Inside,
a tin teapot sold for forty kopecks, more than twice what it cost in a regular
shop, and meat sold at fifty percent higher than market rate. Pilgrims com-
plained most bitterly about being forced to buy Volunteer Fleet steamship tick-
ets in the hajj complex for twice the price charged by foreign steamship
companies. Agents inside the complex pressured them to buy round-trip tick-
ets, and they resented what they saw as an attempt to exploit them and achieve
a monopoly over the traffic. “If you figure that 20,000 hajj pilgrims pass through
Odessa every year,” wrote one angry pilgrim, “you can begin to understand the
motivations behind those who built the hajj complex.” Told by Gurzhi they
were not allowed to buy one-way tickets, “extremely outraged” Muslims began
to protest, which ignited a riot. The police arrived, hauled off the leader of the
protest to the precinct, and arrested eleven others.^97
Many pilgrims also picked up on the obvious overlays of racism and conta-
gion around the hajj complex, and accused Russian officials in Odessa of dis-
crimination against Muslims. This came from their firsthand observations of
how differently Orthodox pilgrims were treated in the city. Odessa was also a
center of Orthodox pilgrimage to Jerusalem at this time, and hajj pilgrims often
arrived in the city on the same trains with Orthodox pilgrims.^98 In Va g i t, one
hajj pilgrim described how his Orthodox traveling companions were free to
stay “wherever they wanted,” and walked freely off the train and into the city.
They “were not escorted by gendarmes, and were not each charged fifteen rubles
for ‘sanitary costs.’ ” He, like others, also resented the identification of hajj pil-
grims with cholera. As soon as the authorities understand you are a pilgrim, he
wrote, they look at you like a “cholera microbe.”^99
Abdürreşid Ibrahim, a leading early twentieth-century Tatar intellectual, would
make the same charge in his travel memoirs, based on a visit to Odessa in 1908.
He described with indignation how ships arrived in port filled with “hundreds