40 Chapter One
By offering his services to Russia’s Muslim pilgrims, and registering their
passports with the vice-consulate, vice-consul Telatinidis was able to compile
data on the hajj traffic from the Caucasus, in a sense functioning as a spy. He
kept detailed records on pilgrims who came to seek his help—recording their
names, ages, passport numbers (if they had them), and places of residence—and
wrote quarterly reports on the hajj traffic that were forwarded on to Vorontsov
by way of the Russian embassy in Constantinople. These reports provided
Vorontsov and officials in the Caucasus with valuable information on Muslim
subjects under their rule: the geography of their hajj routes abroad; Muslim
elites they met with during their stay in Damascus; their reception by Ottoman
dignitaries; attacks, robberies, and deaths during the journey; and the status of
their estates.^69
Bazili worked closely with Telatinidis to provide services to Russia’s hajj pil-
grims in Damascus, competing with and to some extent displacing Ottoman
officials, institutions, and networks organized around the hajj, as well as the local
hajj service industry. He offered the Damascus vice-consulate as a place for pil-
grims to store money and valuables. He also advertised the vice-consul’s services
to settle estate cases for the many pilgrims who died while making the hajj. Bazili
noted with satisfaction the “first example” in 1846 of pilgrims choosing the legal
intervention of the Russian vice-consul instead of the Islamic court, in an estate
case of a Russian-subject pilgrim who died while making the hajj. This pilgrim,
from the North Caucasus, had died in Damascus before the departure of the hajj
caravan, and Telatinidis processed his case. He took the deceased’s property into
the consulate, and conferred with notables traveling with the deceased to dis-
tribute it to the proper heirs, in accordance with Islamic law. Bazili reported that
the pilgrims had “spontaneously” sought Telatinidis’s intervention, and he saw
this as a sign that they had “more confidence in him than in the Ottoman author-
ities in Damascus.” He noted that the Ottoman authorities were frustrated to be
deprived of this “traditionally lucrative” role, but were forced to recognize the
legal right of the Russian agent to settle this case.^70
For centuries estate cases had been an important source of revenue for the
Ottoman state. They quickly became one of the main hajj issues for Russia’s con-
sular officials, as well as part of the extraterritorial legal protection they offered
to Russian subjects.^71 To recall, the Russian subject Kasym Mamad died in Mecca
in 1848, leaving behind questions about the fate of a large sum of money he had
left with a Damascus camel driver, and setting off a two-year investigation into
his estate, led by Bazili and Telatinidis. The archival record in the Mamad estate
case ends abruptly, giving us no sense of how it was finally resolved, or if his