26 Chapter One
than a response to acute need. Only a small number of Russian Orthodox
Christians made the Jerusalem pilgrimage; reports from the Russian embassy
in Constantinople estimated just a few hundred a year.^27 Surely some eluded the
embassy’s record, but it is unlikely that they were numerous. The trip from Rus-
sia to Syria was long, costly, and dangerous, and Orthodox pilgrimage, unlike
the hajj, was not obligatory. But the tsarist government was keen to see the
Orthodox pilgrimage increase, to bolster Russia’s presence in and claims to
interests in Syria. The tsarist government began encouraging its Orthodox
subjects to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem by subsidizing their transportation
and constructing support facilities along their routes, and in and around
Jerusalem.
Over the 1840s, the tsarist government established a Russian Orthodox
ecclesiastical mission in Jerusalem, on the premise of supporting its Orthodox
pilgrims as well as local Eastern Orthodox churches. By the late nineteenth
century, the government had helped fund the establishment of the Russian
Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, which built a network of facilities for
Orthodox pilgrims along their routes between Russia and the Holy Land.
Traces of this history are visible in the physical landscape of Jerusalem now, in
onion-domed Russian Orthodox churches on the Mount of Olives, and the
so-called Russian Compound outside Jerusalem’s old city walls, a multibuild-
ing complex the tsarist state helped build to support Russian Orthodox pil-
grims. (Today parts of the compound house Israeli government offices.)^28
Russia’s support for Orthodox pilgrimage to Jerusalem was part of an emerg-
ing strategy to extend influence into Ottoman Syria through religious networks.
As tsarist officials would soon come to see, Russia had connections to Syria not
only through its Orthodox Christians, but through other subject populations as
well. The complexity of Russia’s relationship to Syria becomes clear when we
start sifting through the archives of the Beirut consulate, looking closely at the
kinds of cases Bazili handled in his first years as Russian consul. We find many
cases involving Armenian and Jewish subjects from Russia, who had come to
Jerusalem and other parts of Ottoman Syria for pilgrimage and trade, and
also—in the case of Jews—as permanent settlers. The archives also reveal
attempts by tsarist officials to expand Russia’s landholding and presence in Jeru-
salem by laying claim to buildings that the Georgian Orthodox Church had
owned in the holy city for centuries.^29 Most strikingly, the Beirut archives con-
tain scores of cases and correspondence involving Russia’s Muslim subjects and
their connections to the region. By and large these cases involve new Russian
subjects from the Caucasus, passing through Syria on their way to and from
Mecca.