Mapping the Hajj, Integrating Muslims 59pockets, and had local contacts to guide and lodge them in the city. This
shielded them from many of the unpleasant situations that their poor compa-
triots suffered; it also meant that elites rarely appealed to the Russian consular
authorities for help abroad, and often evaded their detection and influence.^35
But the vast majority of hajj pilgrims from Russia in these years were not
elites. They were poor, illiterate, and traveling long distances for the first time
in their lives. Not surprisingly, these were the types of pilgrims that most Rus-
sian embassy and consular officials encountered in the Ottoman imperial capi-
tal, thus contributing to their conflation of the hajj with poverty, disease, and
disorder. Hajj pilgrims who showed up at the Russian embassy hailed from
Muslim regions across the Russian Empire, with the greatest number coming
from the Caucasus and Central Asia.
The Russian ambassador in Constantinople and his consul-general received
scores of requests every year from poor Muslim pilgrims stranded in Constan-
tinople. Many had been robbed and were staying in damp, dirty inns, where
disease was rampant. Their desperate situation was an embarrassment for the
embassy. Crowds of pilgrims gathered outside the embassy gates to beg. Rus-
sian consulates in other parts of the Ottoman Empire also reported begging by
hajj pilgrims, most of them from the Caucasus. The viceroy in Tiflis regularly
received correspondence from Russian consuls posted in eastern Anatolia (in
Trabzon and Kars, Erzurum and Batumi) about hajj pilgrims who had come to
the consulate to beg for help. Most of these pilgrims had been robbed or simply
run out money, and many had no passports or papers to prove they were Rus-
sian subjects. Russian consuls spent large sums to get them home—they bought
them steamship tickets, hired guides (kavas) to escort them along land routes,
and bribed quarantine and customs officials on their behalf. They wrote to the
Russian viceroy in Tiflis to ask for reimbursement.^36
This problem was not unique to Russia. Increasingly over the second half of
the nineteenth century, poor Muslims, most colonial subjects, were undertak-
ing the hajj without sufficient funds. To cover their costs, some hired them-
selves out as servants to wealthy compatriots headed to Mecca; others took jobs
along the way. But many also began to show up at European consulates to beg
for money. This pattern suggests a certain resourcefulness on the part of Mus-
lim colonial subjects, who had begun mobilizing their status as European sub-
jects and taking advantage of the new diplomatic institutions and services
available to them for support in making the hajj. Europeans faced the costly
problem of repatriating poor pilgrims, who were stranded in the Hejaz with
no money and no way to get home, and tried different strategies to address it.