paid to Byzantine antiquities, especially when we consider Russian scholars’
disregard for the prehistory in the area of the Russian Empire. Since Catherine
the Great, Orthodox Russia had been viewed as a ‘Third Rome’, the natural
heir of Byzantium. Byzantine antiquities were increasingly valued as symbols
of Russia’s past glories with their resulting inclusion in collections from the
eighteenth century. Yet, in contrast to the archaeology of the other periods,
where some real archaeological research took place, Byzantine studies
remained largely based on the study of a selection of decontextualized items
increasingly encompassed by a newWeld of study, that of history of art. The
major scholars in thisWeld were Ivan Tolstoy, whose work focused on Byzan-
tine coins (Vizantikskije Monety,Monnaies Byzantines, 1912–14), and Niko-
dim Kondakov. The latter has been considered the founder of modern
Byzantine art history in Russia. Kondakov’s method was primarily based on
iconography. As a lecturer at the University of Odessa between 1870 and 1888
he spent his summers travelling and researching Byzantine art. Then, as
professor in St Petersburg from 1888, he expanded his scope to compile
earlier material, resulting in the book with Tolstoy and Reinach mentioned
in the previous section of this chapter. He would inXuence many scholars,
among them Michael Rostovtsev, also referred to earlier (Klejn & Tikhonov
2006: 198–9).
Regarding museums, in the Hermitage Byzantine antiquities came from
the purchase of private collections. A key acquisition was the medieval works
of art, including a large quantity of Byzantine pieces made in 1884 from the
Russian diplomat Alexander Basilewsky (Norman 1997: 94). The collection
had been assembled over the course of forty years by Basilewski while in
Paris, where it had created a furore when displayed at the Universal Exhib-
ition of 1878. Like similar confessional museums funded in Western Europe
under what was at the time called in the Catholic world ‘Sacred Archaeology’
(Chapter 5), the Church Archaeological Society organized a museum at the
Kyyiv Theological Academy in 1872. It was directed by Mykola I. Petrov
(1840–1921) and, among the collections, there were Byzantine icons of the
fourth toWfteenth centuries. Apparently similar collections had been gath-
ered by cognate societies in Chernihiv, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Poltava, and
Zhytomyr.
The growing taste for Oriental antiquities, already noted for the case of
Turkey and Egypt in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Chapter 6), was
also apparent in Russia. Since the eighteenth century, the collection of Byzan-
tine antiquities had created a market for those of the Islamic period. As in the
case of Byzantine antiquities, a comparison with the collectors of Scythian
antiquities shows a clear imbalance in numbers to the detriment of those of
Islamic antiquities. In the eighteenth century Peter the Great had inaugurated
Russian Empire and French North Africa 261