154 Chapter Four
Hajj memoirs confirm the growing popularity of this route. In one account
from 1899, a Tatar from the Volga region named Khamidullah Al’mushev
described his hajj journey by railroad from St. Petersburg (where he met with a
wealthy patron, a Muslim Duma deputy, who was generously covering the costs
of his pilgrimage) through Warsaw and Vienna and on to Constantinople,
where he boarded a steamship to Jeddah. Al’mushev’s account does not explain
his choice of this indirect route. But in 1899 the Russian government had
banned the hajj due to cholera, so it seems likely that Al’mushev chose this
route to avoid the appearance of making the Muslim pilgrimage, and to evade
strict border controls in the Black Sea during the hajj ban.^128 In another account
of the hajj from 1911, Tatar merchant Hasan Akchura (a member of the wealthy
industrialist family from Simbirsk, and a relative of the famous Muslim politi-
cal leader, Yusuf Akchura) took a similar route by railroad through Central
Europe and steamship via Trieste. In Akchura’s case, this more circuitous route
seems to have been determined by war and political upheaval in the Ottoman
Empire: with the Balkan Wars raging, Constantinople was unsafe and he
doubtless sought to avoid it.^129
Still, most hajj pilgrims followed the Black Sea routes, which seemed to prom-
ise speed and safety over alternate land routes, but continued to disappoint pil-
grims in many ways. The Russian press described the terrible conditions that
the empire’s hajj pilgrims continued to suffer abroad along the Black Sea-Red
Sea route. In sharp contrast to ROPiT and Volunteer Fleet advertisements tout-
ing the ease, comfort, and speed of their “Hejaz steamships,” many who took
these ships went hungry on board for days, were abused along their routes and
delayed in crowded quarantines, and found the journey altogether miserable.^130
In Constantinople, crowds of impoverished Russian and Bukharan pilgrims
were fixtures in the city’s landscape, begging and sleeping in the streets, most of
them penniless and stranded on their way to or from Jeddah. In 1910 the mayor
of Constantinople wrote the Ottoman interior minister about the “urgent need”
to build a lodging house (misafirhane) to get them off the streets.^131
Disagreements and miscommunications among tsarist officials involved in
the functioning of Russia’s hajj infrastructure were endemic and, apparently,
unsolvable. As of 1913, tsarist officials were still convening interministerial
conferences on how to organize the hajj “once and for all,” and Muslim deputies
in the Duma were angrily raising the issue in meetings of the parliament. The
Russian press reported that the issue of government leadership of the hajj, first
raised in the Duma by Stolypin, had “stalled” since then, to the detriment of the
empire’s Muslims.^132